SILENCE (1894-1898)

The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed much
education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such as no
one had thought within its powers, the individual crawled as he best
could, through the wreck, and found many values of life upset. But for
connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893
to 1897, had no value in the drama of education, and might be left out.
Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the
ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been the fortunes of Clarence
King. The lesson taught whatever the bystander chose to read in it; but
to Adams it seemed singularly full of moral, if he could but understand
it. In 1871 he had thought King's education ideal, and his personal
fitness unrivalled. No other young American approached him for the
combination of chances--physical energy, social standing, mental scope
and training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively
American and irresistibly strong. His nearest rival was Alexander
Agassiz, and, as far as their friends knew, no one else could be
classed with them in the running. The result of twenty years' effort
proved that the theory of scientific education failed where most theory
fails--for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he
thought, quite outside of every possible financial risk, had been
caught in the cogs, and held for months over the gulf of bankruptcy,
saved only by the chance that the whole class of millionaires were more
or less bankrupt too, and the banks were forced to let the mice escape
with the rats; but, in sum, education without capital could always be
taken by the throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped
by the knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered.
Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education was the same.
The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to back it, was
flagrant.

  The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless without
money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to be frozen out.
Education must fit the complex conditions of a new society, always
accelerating its movement, and its fitness could be known only from
success. One looked about for examples of success among the educated of
one's time--the men born in the thirties, and trained to professions.
Within one's immediate acquaintance, three were typical: John Hay,
Whitelaw Reid, and William C. Whitney; all of whom owed their free hand
to marriage, education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in
1893, William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type.

  Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was
exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich
for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might
occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them, and
never showed them respect. Scarcely one of the very rich men held any
position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been elected
to an office, or even into a good club. Setting aside the few, like
Pierpont Morgan, whose social position had little to do with greater or
less wealth, riches were in New York no object of envy on account of
the joys they brought in their train, and Whitney was not even one of
the very rich; yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason
for it. Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having
gratified every ambition, and swung the country almost at his will; he
had thrown away the usual objects of political ambition like the ashes
of smoked cigarettes; had turned to other amusements, satiated every
taste, gorged every appetite, won every object that New York afforded,
and, not yet satisfied, had carried his field of activity abroad, until
New York no longer knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He
had succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed.

  Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal;
but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an American education
ought to be in order to count as success. Even granting that it counted
as money, its value could not be called general. America contained
scores of men worth five millions or upwards, whose lives were no more
worth living than those of their cooks, and to whom the task of making
money equivalent to education offered more difficulties than to Adams
the task of making education equivalent to money. Social position
seemed to have value still, while education counted for nothing. A
mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if fortunate
might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open market. An
administrator, organizer, manager, with mediaeval qualities of energy
and will, but no education beyond his special branch, would probably be
worth at least ten times as much. Society had failed to discover what
sort of education suited it best. Wealth valued social position and
classical education as highly as either of these valued wealth, and the
women still tended to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could
see he was himself as contented as though he had been educated; while
Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory, had
failed; and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams, had
achieved phenomenal success.

  Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile use of
the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With
these he could still make his way to any object within his vision, and
would have a decisive advantage over nine rivals in ten. Statesman or
lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest or professor, native or foreign,
he would fear none.

  King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced him
to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted into the little
town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society, which King knew well,
was more amusing than any other that one had yet discovered in the
whole broad world, but made no profession of teaching anything unless
it were Cuban Spanish or the danza; and neither on his own nor on
King's account did the visitor ask any loftier study than that of the
buzzards floating on the trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or
the colors of sea and shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran
Piedra; but, as though they were still twenty years old and revolution
were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid,
fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief. In
the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were always falling on
one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant political convulsions
taught least. Since the time of Rameses, revolutions have raised more
doubts than they solved, but they have sometimes the merit of changing
one's point of view, and the Cuban rebellion served to sever the last
tie that attached Adams to a Democratic administration. He thought that
President Cleveland could have settled the Cuban question, without war,
had he chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the
Democratic Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and the
gold standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave no
choice between parties. The new American, whether consciously or not,
had turned his back on the nineteenth century before he was done with
it; the gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass
could have no other outcome, and, as so often before, the movement,
once accelerated by attempting to impede it, had the additional, brutal
consequence of crushing equally the good and the bad that stood in its
way.

  The lesson was old--so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex, among the
picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never been fairly
involved in the general motion, and were the more amusing for their
torpor. After passing the winter with King in the West Indies, he
passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and found there little
to study. The Geysers were an old story; the Snake River posed no vital
statistics except in its fordings; even the Tetons were as calm as they
were lovely; while the wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and
corners, laid no traps. In return the party treated them with
affection. Never did a band less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the
roof of the continent. Hay loved as little as Adams did, the labor of
skinning and butchering big game; he had even outgrown the sedate,
middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found the trout of
the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself, who managed
the party loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so much as a
fieldmouse; Iddings the geologist was reduced to shooting only for the
table, and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the simple
life. Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had
vanished; one saw no possible adventures except to break one's neck as
in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent ponies scented an
occasional friendly and sociable bear.

  When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway systems
yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and no sooner had
he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography than with desperate
thirst for exhausting the American field, he set out for Mexico and the
Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean and clearing up, in these six or
eight months, at least twenty thousand miles of American land and water.

  He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life--tropical
islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types.
Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque than
civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's sixtieth year
approached, the artist began to die; only a certain intense cerebral
restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensual stimulants;
one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art were a
trotting-match. For this, one was in some degree prepared, for the old
man had been a stage-type since drama began; but one felt some
perplexity to account for failure on the opposite or mechanical side,
where nothing but cerebral action was needed.

  Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic, he
plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find the
surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had ever
approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited statistics,
endless columns of figures, bottomless averages merely for the asking.
At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Ford supplied any material that
curiosity could imagine for filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and
methods for applying the plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be
winning ground, and one's averages projected themselves as laws into
the future. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the
attitude of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in
their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they talked
like other men who knew less. The method did not result in faith. Indeed,
every increase of mass--of volume and velocity--seemed to bring in new
elements, and, at last, a scholar, fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of
algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of
facts. Nothing came out as it should. In principle, according to
figures, any one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame
no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam
Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the
anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the
ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the
prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the
future; but meanwhile these societies which violated every law, moral,
arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated each other, but
produced also fresh complexities with every propagation and developed
mass with every complexity.

  The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying
discovery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as
the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very much
concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the
anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams
disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future
society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at
finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind
march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from
one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason but
temper, falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres had
become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed
up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost
continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South
Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them
all not merely unnecessary, but foolish--induced by greed of the
coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still robbing
their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and inevitable, but the
murder seemed altogether archaic.

  At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of
Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral
improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press.
Possibly growth in human nature might show itself there. He found no
need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he preferred
on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment;
and he very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of religious
void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or
even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an act, or an
expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.

  The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care for;
if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the mass of
mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics, travel
had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair had only confused
the roads. Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind was
already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of chance
images stored away without order in the memory. One might as well try
to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student
less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself
ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

  For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe
with the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is useful to
the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of
this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called
historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The
woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one
or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself. The
American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw
her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth;
none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so
familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to
history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much
better company than the American man; she was probably much better
company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, Senator
since 1893, Adams's relations had been those of elder brother or uncle
since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left his examination-papers on
Assistant Professor Adams's desk, and crossed the street to Christ
Church in Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself, as scholar,
fellow instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and
political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but
with him afterwards as politician he had not much relation; and since
Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not
only a Senator but a Senator from Massachusetts--a singular social
relation which Adams had known only as fatal to friends--a
superstitious student, intimate with the laws of historical fatality,
would rather have recognized him only as an enemy; but apart from this
accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the waste places of average
humanity had been greatly dependent on his house. Senators can never be
approached with safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and
several superior children who feel no deference for Senators as such,
may be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep him
under restraint.

Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it
chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at Caen,
Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history had a chapter
with which he thought himself familiar, it was the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do with knowledge that
these bare playgrounds of the lecture system turned into green and
verdurous virgin forests merely through the medium of younger eyes and
fresher minds. His German bias must have given his youth a terrible
twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessential
because un-German. They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a
compliment which would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or
even in sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life
in trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed
nothing less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in the
touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of the
senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an unusual chance, even
a Senator became natural, simple, interested, cultivated, artistic,
liberal--genial.

  Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One could
not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of mere
antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it expelled
archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without seeming conscious
of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington with a new sense of
history. Again he wandered south, and in April returned to Mexico with
the Camerons to study the charms of pulque and Churriguerresque
architecture. In May he ran through Europe again with Hay, as far south
as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage. After thus covering once
more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home in
October, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and start the
world anew.

  For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams
wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or
historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything he wanted
to save; and in this respect he reflected only the public mind which
balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both parties as
to express no sympathy with either. Even among the most powerful men of
that generation he knew none who had a good word to say for it. No
period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in American politics since
Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society;
but the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a
small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to depend
abjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged one's self down
the long vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's
friends, and avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown
narrow with years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses
round La Fayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in power
except in the case of Mr. Blaine whose tumultuous struggle for
existence held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House
and laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole
nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the
world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders for London.
Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had been buried in
Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life either at home or
abroad, and broke up his house on the Square. Only the Lodges and
Roosevelts remained, but even they were at once absorbed in the
interests of power. Since 1861, no such social convulsion had occurred.

  Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most strongly
the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the man in the
State Department seemed more important than the man in the White House.
Adams knew no one in the United States fit to manage these matters in
the face of a hostile Europe, and had no candidate to propose; but he
was shocked beyond all restraints of expression to learn that the
President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the State Department in
order to make a place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himself had
done nothing that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long
enough to distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not
between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for the
place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was notoriously
feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to Adams the
betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Department. One might
have shrugged one's shoulders had the President named Mr. Hanna his
Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna was a man of force if not of
experience, and selections much worse than this had often turned out
well enough; but John Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down.

  The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the
petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor was the matter
improved by hints that the President might call John Hay to the
Department whenever John Sherman should retire. Indeed, had Hay been
even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, he would have put an end,
once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his friend's
part; but even without this last disaster, one felt that Washington had
become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary
contemplation of Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more
amusing than the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which
offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls
embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely cause
anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!

  Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached the
month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years' dogged
effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend it to the
young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had become more
and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the Civil Law had been
locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860. Noah's dove had not
searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so little
success. Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove who wants and finds
rest; but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone and
uneducated, who has lost his taste even for olives. To this, also, the
young may be driven, as education, and the lesson fails in humor; but
it may be worth knowing to some of them that the planet offers hardly a
dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui,
and none at all where he can pass a year.

  Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his
years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the task
of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a right to
require amusement--or at least education, since this costs nothing to
any one--and that a world which cannot educate, will not amuse, and is
ugly besides, has even less right to exist than he. Both views seem
sound; but the world wearily objects to be called by epithets what
society always admits in practice; for no one likes to be told that he
is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having nothing to say in its
defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is pardonable in youth, the
man of sixty who wishes consideration had better hold his tongue. This
truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for
men of half that age Only the very young have the right to betray their
ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to
betray themselves.

  Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one
point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in others. Of all
characteristics in human nature, this has been one of the most abiding.
Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long history of human
expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid by the wise, shows
that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever existed on this.
"Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he holdeth his peace, is
counted wise," and still more often, the wisest of men, when he spoke
the highest wisdom, has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the
merits of silence in others. Socrates made remarks in its favor, which
should have struck the Athenians as new to them; but of late the
repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlyle vociferated his
admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best form of
expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of
expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most noble to
the end. Alfred de Vigny's dying wolf remarked:--

    "A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
     Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse."
    "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,
  Only silence is strong,--all the rest is but lies."

Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have decided
to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm that--

  "The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen
   Than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest;"

with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The evidence
of the poets could not be more emphatic:--

  "Silent, while years engrave the brow!
   Silent,--the best are silent now!"

  Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in
silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all
philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, had ever
been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few were believed to
have attained ignorance, which was in result the same. More than this,
in every society worth the name, the man of sixty had been encouraged
to ride this hobby--the Pursuit of Ignorance in Silence--as though it
were the easiest way to get rid of him. In America the silence was more
oppressive than the ignorance; but perhaps elsewhere the world might
still hide some haunt of futilitarian silence where content
reigned--although long search had not revealed it--and so the
pilgrimage began anew!

  The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in London
that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about it;
education could not be expected there; but there Adams arrived, April
21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many days, for Queen
Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in St. James's Street.
True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets of Rome, actually
squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like Odysseus before
the press of shadows, daunted by a "bloodless fear"; but in spring
London is pleasant, and it was more cheery than ever in May, 1897, when
every one was welcoming the return of life after the long winter since
1893. One's fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes, were again in flood.

  This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars
better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled
Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled Venus to show
him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a sort
of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris, and set up a household at
St. Germain where he taught and learned French history for nieces who
swarmed under the venerable cedars of the Pavillon d'Angouleme, and
rode about the green forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time
to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the
summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel at
home in France as in other countries he had thought more homelike. At
length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because he could go
nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hays came by, in January,
1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a stanch and strong ally for twenty
years, bade him go with them to Egypt.

  Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and what
they said had as little to do with education as possible, until one
evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the Nile from
Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to announce the sinking
of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the greatest stride in
education since 1865, but what did it teach? One leant on a fragment of
column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep down the
debris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the same
wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of
silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx.
Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between civilizations was
that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He
tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to
Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of Tiryns;
together they went on to Constantinople and studied the great walls of
Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian. His hobby had turned
into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long enough in silence, that at
last he might come on a city of thought along the great highways of
exchange.

INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)

  The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life
to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap in
peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had reason to
be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no such sense of
power and momentum, and had seen no such number of personal friends
wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for much in one's
contentment, but the sense of winning one's game counts for more; and
in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly interesting to the last
survivor of the Legation of 1861. He thought himself perhaps the only
person living who could get full enjoyment of the drama. He carried
every scene of it, in a century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite
alive in his mind--all the interminable disputes of his disputatious
ancestors as far back as the year 1750--as well as his own
insignificance in the Civil War, every step in which had the object of
bringing England into an American system. For this they had written
libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war,
losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle and patient
Puritan nature of their descendants, until even their private
secretaries at times used language almost intemperate; and suddenly, by
pure chance, the blessing fell on Hay. After two hundred years of
stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument and no violence
affected, the people of England learned their lesson just at the moment
when Hay would otherwise have faced a flood of the old anxieties. Hay
himself scarcely knew how grateful he should be, for to him the change
came almost of course. He saw only the necessary stages that had led to
it, and to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still living in the
atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance of
Germany as the grizzly terror which, in twenty years effected what
Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain--frightened England into
America's arms--seemed as melodramatic as any plot of Napoleon the
Great. He could feel only the sense of satisfaction at seeing the
diplomatic triumph of all his family, since the breed existed, at last
realized under his own eyes for the advantage of his oldest and closest
ally.

  This was history, not education, yet it taught something
exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For
the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose working
itself out in history. Probably no one else on this earthly planet--not
even Hay--could have come out on precisely such extreme personal
satisfaction, but as he sat at Hay's table, listening to any member of
the British Cabinet, for all were alike now, discuss the Philippines as
a question of balance of power in the East, he could see that the
family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand
perspective of true empire-building, which Hay's work set off with
artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations looked
stronger and larger in scale for the refinement and certainty of the
arcade. In the long list of famous American Ministers in London, none
could have given the work quite the completeness, the harmony, the
perfect ease of Hay.

  Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law
in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it, for
chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal property by
inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in the affairs
of man--a property which no one else had right to dispute; and this
personal triumph left him a little cold towards the other diplomatic
results of the war. He knew that Porto Rico must be taken, but he would
have been glad to escape the Philippines. Apart from too intimate an
acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas, he knew the
West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the American
people might think or say about it, they would sooner or later have to
police those islands, not against Europe, but for Europe, and America
too. Education on the outskirts of civilized life teaches not very
much, but it taught this; and one felt no call to shoulder the load of
archipelagoes in the antipodes when one was trying painfully to pluck
up courage to face the labor of shouldering archipelagoes at home. The
country decided otherwise, and one acquiesced readily enough since the
matter concerned only the public willingness to carry loads; in London,
the balance of power in the East came alone into discussion; and in
every point of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the
result as though one had shared in the danger, instead of being
vigorously employed in looking on from a great distance. After all,
friends had done the work, if not one's self, and he too serves a
certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

  In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they made a
sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms rivalling those
of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many beautiful places
scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler or more genial than
Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the Saxons, its avenues, its
terraces, its deer-park, its large repose on the Kentish hillside, and
its broad outlook over what was once the forest of Anderida. Filled
with a constant stream of guests, the house seemed to wait for the
chance to show its charms to the American, with whose activity the
whole world was resounding; and never since the battle of Hastings
could the little telegraph office of the Kentish village have done such
work. There, on a hot July 4, 1898, to an expectant group under the
shady trees, came the telegram announcing the destruction of the
Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen Elizabeth in 1588; and
there, later in the season, came the order summoning Hay to the State
Department.

  Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as he.
No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries of State,
or how little strength he had in reserve against it. Even at Surrenden
he showed none too much endurance, and he would gladly have found a
valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on both sides was earnest,
but the decided voice of the conclave was that, though if he were a
mere office-seeker he might certainly decline promotion, if he were a
member of the Government he could not. No serious statesman could
accept a favor and refuse a service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in
that case he must resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen
fascination for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old
drawback of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes, even
though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him, no doubt,
the service, though hard, might bring some share of profit, but for the
friends who gave this unselfish decision, all would prove loss. For
one, Adams on that subject had become a little daft. No one in his
experience had ever passed unscathed through that malarious marsh. In
his fancy, office was poison; it killed--body and soul--physically and
socially. Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in
proportion as it held more power; but the poison he complained of was
not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for
that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison
was that of the will--the distortion of sight--the warping of mind--the
degradation of tissue--the coarsening of taste--the narrowing of
sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed no office in order
to wield influence. For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting
for him to stoop to it; he enjoyed more than enough power without
office; no one of his position, wealth, and political experience,
living at the centre of politics in contact with the active party
managers, could escape influence. His only ambition was to escape
annoyance, and no one knew better than he that, at sixty years of age,
sensitive to physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality,
vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost of life.

  Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made pretence of
gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and
lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the lighter for
their humor, and his obedience to the President's order was the
gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark views, too,
not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, while Hay had at least
the honors of office, his friends would share only the ennuis of it;
but, as usual with Hay, nothing was gained by taking such matters
solemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left their mark of military
drill on every one who lived through it. He shouldered his pack and
started for home. Adams had no mind to lose his friend without a
struggle, though he had never known such sort of struggle to avail. The
chance was desperate, but he could not afford to throw it away; so, as
soon as the Surrenden establishment broke up, on October 17, he
prepared for return home, and on November 13, none too gladly, found
himself again gazing into La Fayette Square.

  He had made another false start and lost two years more of
education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics nor
society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do with Hay's
politics at home or abroad, and never affected agreement with his views
or his methods, nor did Hay care whether his friends agreed or
disagreed. They all united in trying to help each other to get along
the best way they could, and all they tried to save was the personal
relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten had he not been
helped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her
husband into the habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend
off for an hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay
afterwards, and a chat with any one who called.

  For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits which
were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right to be called
pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued nothing, but drifted as
attraction offered itself. The short session broke up the Washington
circle, so that, on March 22, Adams was able to sail with the Lodges
for Europe and to pass April in Sicily and Rome.

  With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had
left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860,
but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and
violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its study
on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy, without a shade of
sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse teaches
more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli
seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to a centre,
for every new journey led back to its steps--Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi,
Mycenae, Constantinople, Syracuse--all lying on the road to the
Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not
yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral; and New York
sent most of all, for, in forty years, America had made so vast a
stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant
horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic of Brutus and
Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius
Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school
history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as
familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under
Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year,
as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.

  Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
obvious--in no way unpleasant--truth; therefore one sat silent as ever
on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added
a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose
solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory--or
sufficient--ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and
better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St.
Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh
cross-lights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the
astonishing contrast between what he had taught then and what he found
himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years
afterwards--between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of
his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes
of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of
derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and
Soc:--

     HIC JACET
HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
 DOCTOR BARBARICUS
   HENRICUS ADAMS
 ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
   PRIMO EXPLICUIT
       SOCNAM

  The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as
satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of
Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a
shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of
view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph
Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the
clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one
had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School,
because one could see no other path to a profession.

  The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own.
St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the
whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with
a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no
meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered. He
passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with the last at
Surrenden; but the solitude did what the society did not--it forced and
drove him into the study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last he
entered the practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could
no longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a methodical
survey--a triangulation--of the twelfth century. The pursuit had a
singular French charm which France had long lost--a calmness, lucidity,
simplicity of expression, vigor of action, complexity of local color,
that made Paris flat. In the long summer days one found a sort of
saturated green pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in
the little twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassuming as
their own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches;
but churches were many and summer was short, so that he was at last
driven back to the quays and photographs. For weeks he lived in silence.

  His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new value.
Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since 1850 John La
Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat at
his feet since 1872, the question how much he owed to La Farge could be
answered only by admitting that he had no standard to measure it by. Of
all his friends La Farge alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast
against the commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had
vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The
American mind--the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western--likes
to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it
takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional
analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional
expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality. The
most disconcerting trait of John La Farge was his reversal of the
process. His approach was quiet and indirect; he moved round an object,
and never separated it from its surroundings; he prided himself on
faithfulness to tradition and convention; he was never abrupt and
abhorred dispute. His manners and attitude towards the universe were
the same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sketching
the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of sea-sickness, or
drinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of Japan, or sipping his
cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of Samoan chiefs, or reflecting
under the sacred bo-tree at Anaradjpura.

  One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but always
there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it flowed, for
even a contradiction was to him only a shade of difference, a
complementary color, about which no intelligent artist would dispute.
Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams, you reason too much!" was one
of his standing reproaches even in the mild discussion of rice and
mangoes in the warm night of Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed
Adams for being born in Boston. The mind resorts to reason for want of
training, and Adams had never met a perfectly trained mind.

  To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone--a shade--a
nuance--and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of course
all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, but
few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive
between their art and their talk. One evening Humphreys Johnston, who
was devoted to La Farge, asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge
was ill--more ill than usual even for him--but he admired and liked
Whistler, and insisted on going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to
overhear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear that
of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At that moment the Boer War was
raging, and, as every one knows, on that subject Whistler raged worse
than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed against England--witty,
declamatory, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and noisy; but in substance
what he said was not merely commonplace--it was true! That is to say,
his hearers, including Adams and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed
with it all, and mostly as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent,
and this difference of expression was a difference of art. Whistler in
his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point
reached by La Farge, or even attempted; but in talk he showed, above or
below his color-instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real
eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed.

  This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his painting,
La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value of La
Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams was too
ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible more
ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to the twelfth
century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt at home, but felt
a sort of ownership. No other American had a right there, unless he too
were a member of the Church and worked in glass. Adams himself was an
interloper, but long habit led La Farge to resign himself to Adams as
one who meant well, though deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, though
near sixty years old before he knew anything either of glass or of
Chartres, asked no better than to learn, and only La Farge could help
him, for he knew enough at least to see that La Farge alone could use
glass like a thirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been dead
for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge felt the
early glass rather as a document than as a historical emotion, and in
hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and Paris, Adams knew
barely one or two that were meant to hold their own against a
color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La Farge's mind was
opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color
toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it
was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and
vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

  Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a step
backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health became more and more
alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back to New York,
January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to Washington to find
out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could be hoped, for Hay's
troubles had begun, and were quite as great as he had foreseen. Adams
saw as little encouragement as Hay himself did, though he dared not say
so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness in supporting
him, and the loyalty of his party friends; but all this worry on Hay's
account fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War did on his own.
Here was a problem in his political education that passed all
experience since the Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to his
astonishment, very few Americans seemed to share his point of view;
their hostility to England seemed mere temper; but to Adams the war
became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from childhood,
even in England, that his forbears and their associates in 1776 had
settled, once for all, the liberties of the British free colonies, and
he very strongly objected to being thrown on the defensive again, and
forced to sit down, a hundred and fifty years after John Adams had
begun the task, to prove, by appeal to law and fact, that George
Washington was not a felon, whatever might be the case with George III.
For reasons still more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain
question of the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even
further, and avow the opinion that if at any time England should take
towards Canada the position she took towards her Boer colonies, the
United States would be bound, by their record, to interpose, and to
insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him the
attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed exceedingly
un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.

  Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue,
and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could
never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical
objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms. Hay's
chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck should turn, and
to him the only object was time; but as political education the point
seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shutting his eyes or denying an
evident fact. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but
education and politics are two different and often contradictory
things. In this case, the contradiction seemed crude.

  With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram Hewitt,
Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden--men who played the game for
ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the
professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of
the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of
the work. In return, the professionals felt no great love for them, and
set them aside when they could. Only their control of money made them
inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. The story
of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman series, and that
of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside the one; President
Harrison set aside the other. "There is no politics in it," was his
comment on Hay's appointment to office. Hay held a different opinion
and turned to McKinley whose judgment of men was finer than common in
Presidents. Mr. McKinley brought to the problem of American government
a solution which lay very far outside of Henry Adams's education, but
which seemed to be at least practical and American. He undertook to
pool interests in a general trust into which every interest should be
taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should, under
his management, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results.
How much they cost was another matter; if the public is ever driven to
its last resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the result will
probably cost more.

  Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of whom
was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and his task
hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by simply paying
their price; but abroad whatever helped on one side, hurt him on
another. Hay thought England must be brought first into the combine;
but at that time Germany, Russia, and France were all combining against
England, and the Boer War helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally,
abroad or at home, except Pauncefote, and Adams always maintained that
Pauncefote alone pulled him through.

  Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more unmanageable,
even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was less the fault of
the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of peace, in any normal state
of things," said Hay, "ought to be ratified with unanimity in
twenty-four hours. They wasted six weeks in wrangling over this one,
and ratified it with one vote to spare. We have five or six matters now
demanding settlement. I can settle them all, honorably and
advantageously to our own side; and I am assured by leading men in the
Senate that not one of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the
Senate. I should have a majority in every case, but a malcontent third
would certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the
original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of our
politics. You must understand, it is not merely my solution the Senate
will reject. They will reject, for instance, any treaty, whatever, on
any subject, with England. I doubt if they would accept any treaty of
consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrant third would be
differently composed, but it would be on hand. So that the real duties
of a Secretary of State seem to be three: to fight claims upon us by
other States; to press more or less fraudulent claims of our own
citizens upon other countries; to find offices for the friends of
Senators when there are none. Is it worth while--for me--to keep up
this useless labor?"

  To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it in a
dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred years
before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be humorous. The
intrigue was too open to be interesting. The interference of the German
and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with the press and the
Senate was innocently undisguised. The charming Russian Minister, Count
Cassini, the ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days
pass without appealing through the press to the public against the
government. The German Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously did the
same thing, and of course every whisper of theirs was brought instantly
to the Department. These three forces, acting with the regular
opposition and the natural obstructionists, could always stop action in
the Senate. The fathers had intended to neutralize the energy of
government and had succeeded, but their machine was never meant to do
the work of a twenty-million horse-power society in the twentieth
century, where much work needed to be quickly and efficiently done. The
only defence of the system was that, as Government did nothing well, it
had best do nothing; but the Government, in truth, did perfectly well
all it was given to do; and even if the charge were true, it applied
equally to human society altogether, if one chose to treat mankind from
that point of view. As a matter of mechanics, so much work must be
done; bad machinery merely added to friction.

  Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling it
to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all: he laughed and
accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would have gladly lived
his entire life over again exactly as it happened. In the whole New
York school, one met a similar dash of humor and cynicism more or less
pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even the gayest of tempers succumbs
at last to constant friction. The old friend was rapidly fading. The
habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual
humor, the equality of indifference, were sinking into the routine of
office; the mind lingered in the Department; the thought failed to
react; the wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and
the irritations multiplied. To a head of bureau, the result seemed
ennobling.

  Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that these
political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and twentieth
centuries should be correlated in some relation of movement that could
be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the
world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough
mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s = gt^2/2.
If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an
obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square could take
liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction
into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even
infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical
formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar universe
weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like this was one in
which he could look for no help from anybody--he could look only for
derision at best.

  All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as
futile and almost immoral--certainly hostile to sound historical
system. Adams tried it only because of its hostility to all that he had
taught for history, since he started afresh from the new point that,
whatever was right, all he had ever taught was wrong. He had pursued
ignorance thus far with success, and had swept his mind clear of
knowledge. In beginning again, from the starting-point of Sir Isaac
Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in
Washington cared to overstep the school conventions, and the most
distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to
treat such a scheme seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his
rank in science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams
never enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most
distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more accessible,
to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever he wanted
an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley listened with
outward patience to his disputatious questionings; but he too nourished
a scientific passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its
avowal. He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know
nothing between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great
observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists,
he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of
philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers
to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander
past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as
though recognizing their existence, while doubting their
respectability. He generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to
affirm; and early put into Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern
Science," a volume by Judge Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen
years by the schools with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably
meets every revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.

  Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be as
ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant
nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough, or was
too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never to direction or
progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it
could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything
must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure; and
so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more, and found himself on May 12
settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero.

In the aftermath of the depression of 1893, Adams discusses the unfortunate fate of Clarence King, perhaps the man he admires most in his generation. King and Adams visit Cuba in February and March of 1894, enjoying the sights but also noticing an increasing revolutionary spirit opposing the rule of Spain. Adams becomes devoted to the concept of Cuban independence, proposing to Congress a peaceful, diplomatic resolution in an address titled "Recognition of Cuban Independence," delivered on December 21, 1896. Because diplomacy fails, Adams welcomes the Spanish-American War of 1898. Intellectually, he enjoys a kind of "Indian summer," a period of tranquility and reflection preceding his engagement with theories of science and history in the early 1900s.

Henry's interest in Cuba is the direct result of his friendship with Clarence King, the geologist whom he met in Estes Park in the summer of 1871 and with whom he shared a close friendship for the rest of King's life. Even at first meeting, Adams valued King among the greatest men he'd known and felt that he had all the qualities that Henry most admired. It is especially disturbing to Henry that King is destroyed in the Panic of 1893. Not only does his dear friend lose most of his fortune, but his mental stability is also rocked, landing him in the Bloomingdale asylum. From there, King writes to Henry in January 1894, proposing a trip to Cuba: "What do you say to taking the island trip with me?" Recognizing King's expertise in the third world, Henry jumps at the chance. Adams visited the island briefly in 1888, but he anticipates seeing the real Cuba with King. Henry jokes to a friend, "I expect to find a Carib woman and never reappear among civilized man." In addition to the sights, the native dances, and all the local color, the two middle-aged adventurers notice a ferment of political unrest. Traveling companions often comment on Henry's devotion to correspondence, which one can study in the six volumes of his Letters. In the South Seas a few years earlier, La Farge noticed that Adams even took along his pen, paper, and writing board while traveling in a canoe in order to dash off a letter. In Cuba, Henry spends the evening writing letters while King mixes with the local population. King hears of a coming rebellion, which grows out of resentment toward subjection to cruel Spanish rule. If anything, the Ten-Year War for Cuban independence, ending in failure in 1878, had just made matters worse; the economy is suffering, and the prison system is notoriously harsh. Adams and King discuss the apparently burgeoning revolution. Henry returns to the States an advocate of Cuban independence. An active revolution does begin on the island in 1895. Adams's speech to Congress in 1896, calling for diplomatic intervention, fails to elicit the desired response. War with Spain seems the only way out. Thanks to the preparations of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, the United States is superior to Spain as a sea power; and Americans are itching for a fight. Businessmen would like Spain out of the area. The U.S. battleship Maine is sent to the Havana in December 1897, ostensibly to protect United States citizens and property. During the night of February 15, 1898, a horrendous explosion sinks the Maine, killing 260. New York newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst  blame sabotage and call for war, echoing the cry, "Remember the Maine!" On April 25, Congress declares war. The conflict is over by July as a Spanish naval squadron is destroyed attempting to cross a blockade in Santiago harbor. Henry hears about the battle by telegram at Kent on July 4, calling the victory "the destruction of the Spanish Armada." Adams's old friend John Hay is Secretary of State. Adams supports Hay's settlement with Spain: independence for Cuba, while Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines are ceded to the United States. In 1969, U.S. Navy research determines that an explosion in a defective boiler caused the explosion that sunk the Maine. Henry is ready for a new, final phase of intellectual energy. He has been studying the architecture of medieval churches and thinking about the power of Christianity and how it might be compared to the new power released by science. He sees a connection. Glossary satiated filled, satisfied, having had enough or more than enough. prattle to speak in a childish way; babble. debauch to lead astray morally; to corrupt. superannuated old-fashioned or obsolete. impunity free from punishment. embetement  nuisance, a bother.


THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)

  UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to
find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been
grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus
meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley's
behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself
to the skin, for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while
Adams might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the
Milky Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one
might not have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but
though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well as
one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge counted for
nothing until some teacher should show how to apply it. Bacon took a
vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I and his subjects,
American or other, towards the year 1620, that true science was the
development or economy of forces; yet an elderly American in 1900 knew
neither the formula nor the forces; or even so much as to say to
himself that his historical business in the Exposition concerned only
the economies or developments of force since 1893, when he began the
study at Chicago.

  Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked
at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art
Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900.
He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound
attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. Langley, with the ease
of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit
that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw
out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored
almost the whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the
forces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship
feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new
Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a
nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the
electric tram which was only ten years older; and threatening to become
as terrible as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost
exactly Adams's own age.

  Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and
explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind,
even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable
volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any
time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To him, the dynamo itself
was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in
a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept
out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As
he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel
the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians
felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its
old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge
wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and
barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a
hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake
the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to
pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man
before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of
ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the
most expressive.

  Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar
of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult
mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the
engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal
fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover
between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and
the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but
he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley
could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same
trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were
anarchical, and especially that he was not responsible for the new
rays, that were little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit
towards science. His own rays, with which he had doubled the solar
spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent; but Radium denied
its God--or, what was to Langley the same thing, denied the truths of
his Science. The force was wholly new.

  A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as
Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed
himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise
of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped
himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged
Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo; while he
lost his arithmetic in trying to figure out the equation between the
discoveries and the economies of force. The economies, like the
discoveries, were absolute, supersensual, occult; incapable of
expression in horse-power. What mathematical equivalent could he
suggest as the value of a Branly coherer? Frozen air, or the electric
furnace, had some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could
invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose; but X-rays had played no
part whatever in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had figured
only as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man had translated
himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement
with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could
measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible
to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but
perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the
scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable
number of universes interfused--physics stark mad in metaphysics.

  Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories,
or histories--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These
assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been
astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if
any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would
probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves
required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had
toiled in vain to find out what he meant. He had even published a dozen
volumes of American history for no other purpose than to satisfy
himself whether, by severest process of stating, with the least
possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed
rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary
sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied him as little as
at Harvard College. Where he saw sequence, other men saw something
quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared
little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed
to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest; but
he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by
one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied
that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their
society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was
artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to
the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years'
pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great
Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption
of forces totally new.

  Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person
without other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900 was not
the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo had broken
many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its
head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900
was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross. The rays that
Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult,
supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy
like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediaeval science,
were called immediate modes of the divine substance.

  The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly
if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this
common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his
own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt; as convertible,
reversible, interchangeable attractions on thought. He made up his mind
to venture it; he would risk translating rays into faith. Such a
reversible process would vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could
not deny that he, or some of his fellow physicists, could feel the
force of both. When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the
place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of
the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or
automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all,
though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.

  Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be
by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he must
crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms
of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as
different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a
magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still
felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America
neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force--at most as sentiment.
No American had ever been truly afraid of either.

  This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American
historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed
potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown
in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was
ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so
profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of
fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a
feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was
notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans
knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither
art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that
neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was
worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she
was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction--the greatest and most
mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. Singularly
enough, not one of Adams's many schools of education had ever drawn his
attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps
the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus
exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:--

  "Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools:--

  "Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
   Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
   Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."

  All this was to American thought as though it had never
existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of
the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before
this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless;
he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly
coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the
record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest
energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art,
exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the
steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was
unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare
command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

  The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth
century seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost violently
to study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys were as useless
as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos. The idea survived only
as art. There one turned as naturally as though the artist were himself
a woman. Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any
American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as every
classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret
Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two
painters, for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment,
never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias an
unfeminine horror. American art, like the American language and
American education, was as far as possible sexless. Society regarded
this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the historian
readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the moment, did not
concern one who was studying the relations of unmoral force. He cared
nothing for the sex of the dynamo until he could measure its energy.

  Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit,
and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's
General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor. St.
Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual
interminable last touches, and listening to the usual contradictory
suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the American artists who gave
to American art whatever life it breathed in the seventies, St. Gaudens
was perhaps the most sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate.
General Grant or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric
than he. All the others--the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford
White--were exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss or dilate
on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the
forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the despot,
or became brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his world. He
required no incense; he was no egoist; his simplicity of thought was
excessive; he could not imitate, or give any form but his own to the
creations of his hand. No one felt more strongly than he the strength
of other men, but the idea that they could affect him never stirred an
image in his mind.

  This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low. For
such a temper, Adams was not the best companion, since his own gaiety
was not folle; but he risked going now and then to the studio on Mont
Parnasse to draw him out for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, or
dinner as pleased his moods, and in return St. Gaudens sometimes let
Adams go about in his company.

  Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of
Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves
actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on
Adams's mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that spot had more
interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great
monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too
solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol
Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals: "I darted a contemptuous look on
the stately monuments of superstition." Even in the footnotes of his
history, Gibbon had never inserted a bit of humor more human than this,
and one would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little
historian, on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to
persuade his readers--perhaps himself--that he was darting a
contemptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact
the respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always
feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one felt also
the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789 religious
monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and
simple as the green fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of
other remarks, mostly no more fresh and certainly less simple. Without
malice, one might find it more instructive than a whole lecture of
Ruskin. One sees what one brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the
French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St.
Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more
than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity;
their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their decorative
sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the force that
created it all--the Virgin, the Woman--by whose genius "the stately
monuments of superstition" were built, through which she was expressed.
He would have seen more meaning in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo,
who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was
lost even upon the artist.

  Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500s
he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an image
of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis XI. In
mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by chance to the
twentieth century, and forgotten where it came from. He writhed and
cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did at his own, but in the
opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered
in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devoured by
curiosity to think like Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from
birth, and Adams's instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but
half of a nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of
Amiens they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them
one; but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel of
force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of taste.

  For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the
horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monument.
Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so American that,
for at least forty years, Adams had never realized that any other could
be in sound taste. How many years had he taken to admit a notion of
what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but
he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus
as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres--perhaps at
Lourdes--possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely
naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles--but otherwise one must look for force to
the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the
German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less
sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the
Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power--only as
reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely
even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all
other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a
railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the
world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

  Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man
all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured
force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was
the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician
cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no
symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work.
The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as
the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by
ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the
greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's
activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the
track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to;
its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents,
conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could
hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly
than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as
a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were
occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the
Virgin easiest to handle.

  The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last
to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand
in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as
stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with
the instinct of despair could one force one's self into this old
thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed a score of entrances
more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere,
unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of
study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one
controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of
force controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of
education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled
over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force
almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of
blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen
works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material
over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never
arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist
knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and
shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to
return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The
result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what
is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their
play or variety. Compelled once more to lean heavily on this support,
Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures as formal as though
they were algebra, laboriously striking out, altering, burning,
experimenting, until the year had expired, the Exposition had long been
closed, and winter drawing to its end, before he sailed from Cherbourg,
on January 19, 1901, for home.

Henry is infatuated with the Paris Exposition of 1900, which opens on April 15 and runs through the month of November. He has been studying Gothic architecture since 1895, foreshadowing his historical and philosophical meditation, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, privately printed in 1904. During the summer of 1900, he is also reading medieval philosophy. Even with temperatures in the nineties, Henry enjoys this summer in Paris. In July, he writes to Elizabeth Cameron that Thomas Aquinas serves as "liquid air for cooling" his heated blood. Always interested in contrasts and dichotomy, Henry begins to speculate about the medieval strength of Christianity and how it relates to the twentieth-century power generated when mechanical energy produces electricity; this theme will captivate him for the rest of his active intellectual life. In late 1900 or early 1901, he writes a long poem, "Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres," which includes a section titled "Prayer to the Dynamo."

Henry approaches both medieval Christianity and modern technology with skepticism, but comes to respect each in its own time. Through his studies of Gothic architecture, with its spires reaching toward the heavens, and medieval philosophy, with its emphasis on God's will, Adams has gained an appreciation for the significance of the Church in the lives of medieval Christians. As a historian, he looks for relevant sequences that tell something about the story of mankind. With one exception, he is disillusioned: "Satisfied that the sequence of man led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial and the sequence of thought was chaos," he turns to the sequence of force. By "force," Adams means the power that motivates or attracts spiritual or intellectual lives. As discussed in Chapter XXXIII, this force works with something like a gravitational pull. In medieval times, he sees the Church and, symbolically, the Virgin, the mother of Christ, as providing that motivating, attracting force. As Thomas Aquinas wrote  in 1273, "Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do." He is to believe in the teachings of Christ; he is to desire service to God and salvation; he is to do as the Church prescribes. For modern man, Adams asserts, technology, represented symbolically by the dynamo, has replaced the Church. Adams does not necessarily prefer this; as a historian, he simply attempts to describe what is happening. Modern man believes in technology; he desires what he thinks will be scientific progress; he must do what he can to advance with technology. The question of control is undecided by Adams because its answer lies in the future. At one point, decades before the first computer, he even predicts that the time may come when artificial intelligence is so advanced that man will serve machine. Toward the end of 1900 or the beginning of 1901, Adams expresses the dichotomy in his poem "Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres," which includes the "Prayer to the Dynamo." He sends the first copy to Elizabeth Cameron who has played a key role in Henry's emotional life since his wife's suicide. Their friendship needs mention. Nineteen years his junior, and still married to his good friend Senator James Donald Cameron, she has become his confidante. He often sends her private poems. Elizabeth clearly admires Henry's intellect, maturity, and wisdom. Sometimes they tease, in letters, about rumors of a romance; but the relationship appears to have been platonic. The "Prayer to the Virgin" recognizes the force of Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as expressed in the belief in miracles attributed to Our Lady as well as belief in the Madonna's intervention through prayer. The narrative voice is that of Western Man, who journeys back through time to seek guidance from the Virgin. He has lost his innocence along with his belief and finds himself in a materialistic world in which men worship the dynamo. Well into the poem, he offers an example of a modern prayer, "the last / Of the strange prayers Humanity has wailed." This is the "Prayer to the Dynamo." The narrator fears that mankind must master technology or be mastered by it: "Seize, then, the Atom! rack his joints! / Tear out of him his sacred spring! / Grind him to nothing!" At this point, Henry is looking back to medieval belief with some nostalgia. He is a little overwhelmed by the enormous scientific advances of the late nineteenth century, which include, for example, the first small, high-speed combustion engine; the automobile; the discovery of X-rays; and the isolation of radium by the Curies, all alluded to in this chapter of the Education. Soon, Henry will try to use a scientific approach to understand the sequence of history. His religious skepticism has turned to admiration for, if not belief in, medieval Christianity and the symbol of the Virgin. Next, he will turn to technology.  Glossary electric tram here, the basket or car of an overhead conveyor. occult hidden, concealed, secret, esoteric. parricide the act of murdering one's parent. 310 It was actually 313 AD when Roman Emperor Constantine the Great converted to Christianity. The Nicene Creed, a confession of Christian faith, was adopted at the first Nicene Council in 325. folle  mad, insane, out of control. tortuous full of twists and turns.