TWILIGHT (1901)

  WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted
meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the Paris
Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and Besnard,
the world that thought itself serious, and showed other infallible
marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at Peking
and elsewhere such as startled even itself. Of all branches of
education, the science of gauging people and events by their relative
importance defies study most insolently. For three or four generations,
society has united in withering with contempt and opprobrium the
shameless futility of Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du Barry; yet, if one
bid at an auction for some object that had been approved by the taste
of either lady, one quickly found that it were better to buy
half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas, or all the
philosophy and science of their time, than to bid for a cane-bottomed
chair that either of these two ladies had adorned. The same thing might
be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire; while, as every one knows,
the money-value of any hand-stroke of Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or
Sir Joshua, is out of all proportion to the importance of the men.
Society seemed to delight in talking with solemn conviction about
serious values, and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most
futile. The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle for the
control of China, which, in his view, must decide the control of the
world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China was chiefly studied in
Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese porcelain. The value of a
Ming vase was more serious than universal war.

  The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on
future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more
about it than though he were the best-informed statesman in Europe.
Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations were massacred,
and that John Hay, who alone championed China's "administrative
entity," would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on, in
impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China, and shut up
America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten, in Europe, accepted this
result in advance, seeing no way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and
laughed at Hay for his helplessness.

  When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on, as
incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on that
branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing so
meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On returning to
Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the world as astonished
as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a moment, indeed, the world
had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put Europe aside and set the
Washington Government at the head of civilization so quietly that
civilization submitted, by mere instinct of docility, to receive and
obey his orders; but, after the first shock of silence, society felt
the force of the stroke through its fineness, and burst into almost
tumultuous applause. Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century,
with all its painful scuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the
American blushed to be told of his submissions in the past. History
broke in halves.

  Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of
his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh
life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic, and
depression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles nested at
home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's diplomatic court had
become the largest in the world, and the diplomatic relations required
far more work than ever before, while the staff of the Department was
little more efficient, and the friction in the Senate had become
coagulated. Hay took to studying the "Diary" of John Quincy Adams
eighty years before, and calculated that the resistance had increased
about ten times, as measured by waste of days and increase of effort,
although Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly
treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing him, and proved it,
for the effort of the afternoon walk became sometimes painful.

  For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly
team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole load and
turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and Holleben helped
the Senate to make what trouble they could, without serious offence,
and the Irish, after the genial Celtic nature, obstructed even
themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks to their sympathetic qualities,
never made lasting enmities; but the Germans seemed in a fair way to
rouse ill-will and even ugly temper in the spirit of politics, which
was by no means a part of Hay's plans. He had as much as he could do to
overcome domestic friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreign
powers. Yet so much could be said in favor of the foreigners that they
commonly knew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive.
Cassini had for years pursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of
his own, never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief as
with Hay; he made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious objects;
but Senators could seldom give a reason for obstruction. In every
hundred men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, and try to invent
reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no worse than the
board of a university; but incorporators as a rule have not made this
class of men dictators on purpose to prevent action. In the Senate, a
single vote commonly stopped legislation, or, in committee, stifled
discussion.

  Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations,
and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant
obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience and bargaining in
executive patronage, if indeed it could be overcome at all. The price
actually paid was not very great except in the physical exhaustion of
Hay and Pauncefote, Root and McKinley. No serious bargaining of
equivalents could be attempted; Senators would not sacrifice five
dollars in their own States to gain five hundred thousand in another;
but whenever a foreign country was willing to surrender an advantage
without an equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty.
In all such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the
Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of time
and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed Hay; "the
Major will have promised all the consulates in the service; the
Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe me dis-consulate; I
shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by one, by the thirty-four
per cent of kickers and strikers; the only mitigation I can foresee is
being sick a good part of the time; I am nearing my grand climacteric,
and the great culbute is approaching."

  He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight--the solitary
picturesque and tragic element in politics--incidentally requiring
character-studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and
Webster and Sumner, with Sir Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and
stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of
Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades,
Falstaffs, and Malvolios--endless varieties of human nature nowhere
else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or
because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is so gay
and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely, but
what he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the vast
mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly complained that it had made
him a bore--of all things the most senatorial, and to him the most
obnoxious. The old friend was lost, and only the teacher remained,
driven to madness by the complexities and multiplicities of his new
world.

  To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great value
except as measures of mass and motion. For him the practical interest
and the practical man were such as looked forward to the next election,
or perhaps, in corporations, five or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen
men in America could be named who were known to have looked a dozen
years ahead; while any historian who means to keep his alignment with
past and future must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he
seeks to align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of
some sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every
historian--sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably--must have
put to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn
system last? He can never give himself less than one generation to show
the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to triangulate
from the widest possible base to the furthest point he thinks he can
see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon.

  To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right--if
the question of right or wrong enters at all into the matter--the
historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in his own profession
few companions offer help, and his walk soon becomes solitary, leading
further and further into a wilderness where twilight is short and the
shadows are dense. Already Hay literally staggered in his tracks for
weariness. More worn than he, Clarence King dropped. One day in the
spring he stopped an hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and
simply telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his
lungs. All three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that
if it were not the one it would be the other; but the affectation of
readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid resource,
though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed of it even in the
acting.

  The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that
a share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared
from their lives; but Hay had still his family and ambition, while
Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, his eyes
rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie
of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to
reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far
look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the
passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to
fall into King's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left
in life. Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so
little when others knew so much, crushed out hope.

  He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest toy he
knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played since babyhood,
the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk with magnets, and
mapped out their lines of force by compass. Then he read all the books
he could find, and tried in vain to makes his lines of force agree with
theirs. The books confounded him. He could not credit his own
understanding. Here was literally the most concrete fact in nature,
next to gravitation which it defied; a force which must have radiated
lines of energy without stop, since time began, if not longer, and
which might probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
earth, since no one knew why--or how--or what it radiated--or even
whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of all natural
forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have suggested no idea to
any one until some mariner bethought himself that it might serve for a
pointer. Another thousand years passed when it taught some other
intelligent man to use it as a pump, supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir
for collecting electricity, still without knowing how it worked or what
it was. For a historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the
invention of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human
ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as his
mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some one,
somewhere, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could but find
the book--although he had been forced to admit the same helplessness in
the face of gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors; and he could
imagine no reason why society should treat radium as revolutionary in
science when every infant, for ages past, had seen the magnet doing
what radium did; for surely the kind of radiation mattered nothing
compared with the energy that radiated and the matter supplied for
radiation. He dared not venture into the complexities of chemistry, or
microbes, so long as this child's toy offered complexities that
befogged his mind beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless
variety of pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He
wanted to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a magnet.
He figured the human mind itself as another radiating matter through
which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.

  In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the forces.
To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new relation
staggered his new education by its evidence of growing complexity, and
multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He could not escape it;
politics or science, the lesson was the same, and at every step it
blocked his path whichever way he turned. He found it in politics; he
ran against it in science; he struck it in everyday life, as though he
were still Adam in the Garden of Eden between God who was unity, and
Satan who was complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth.
The problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate
as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and Adams.

  All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won. The National Government and the national unity had overcome
every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over
all the curates; yet the greater the unity and the momentum, the worse
became the complexity and the friction. One had in vain bowed one's
neck to railways, banks, corporations, trusts, and even to the popular
will as far as one could understand it--or even further; the
multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was increasing, and
threatened to increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his
favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism--except
for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant
necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and Pteraspis and
ice age and tramways and telephones; and now--just when he was ready to
hang the crowning garland on the brow of a completed education--science
itself warned him to begin it again from the beginning.

  Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a
full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a
confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell, and
that it might be worth looking at if only to steady his vision. He read
it again, and thought it better than he could do at sixty-three; but
elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts grown larger, and
became curious to know what had been said about them since 1870. The
Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes, and reading for steady
months; while, the longer he read, the more he wondered, pondered,
doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have
said about it.

  Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and
the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve
themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one. Adams
asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted towards unity or
multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would depend on the age of the
man who drifted.

  Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the
Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when
geological life was young; as though they had all remained together in
time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat "how
charming is divine philosophy!" He felt almost aggrieved to find
Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the
ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower Trenton
limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by
spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of
known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone
were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for
all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to
hazard even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection
by Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know no more
about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing; but natural
selection that did not select--evolution finished before it
began--minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole
geological record--survival of the highest order in a fauna which had
no origin--uniformity under conditions which had disturbed everything
else in creation--to an honest-meaning though ignorant student who
needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, such sequence
brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused
evolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural
selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted
itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove--to him--that it
had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were
right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in
intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a huge
perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid troubled
Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism
seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of
evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox.
Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own lines
quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up again. A little
more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species.

  What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to them;
but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had
begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter of
direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the
glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities.
In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran
about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping
abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and
sequences that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly
become specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an
amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as
they had served when new.

  So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of
Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into
half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern
hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the
glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a
horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank,
though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work,
showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans
rose and sank. Lyell's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for
nothing had taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown
young, nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge
overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even
to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that
progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.

  Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science
than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no
way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or
discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind
concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern
in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In
thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and
degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites
without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and
had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord
Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this
last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical
Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had
protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological
record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under their
breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on
the tips of their tongues.

  Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times
by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
electrolytic--who knew what?--defying science, if not denying known
law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a
"larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into
far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts
to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the
process in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon
reached where larger synthesis is suicide.

 Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the
change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any
student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his thought,
should delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion, as he
delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated
statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and
dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this
sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years help
nothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape
floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed
to the end; but they could at least float with the stream if they only
knew which way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh
with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged and
unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it serve? A
seeker of truth--or illusion--would be none the less restless, though a
shark!

TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)

  INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no other
spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side. Even
more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris taught in the
twentieth, with no other school approaching it for variety of direction
and energy of mind. Of the teaching in detail, a man who knew only what
accident had taught him in the nineteenth century, could know next to
nothing, since science had got quite beyond his horizon, and
mathematics had become the only necessary language of thought; but one
could play with the toys of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons
of painting, operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architecture,
theology and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about with Joe
Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying
"Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the charm of youth and the
Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris remained
Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though China fell.
Scores of artists--sculptors and painters, poets and dramatists,
workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs and furniture--hundreds
of chemists, physicists, even philosophers, philologists, physicians,
and historians--were at work, a thousand times as actively as ever
before, and the mass and originality of their product would have
swamped any previous age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the
effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as
before the chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front
of the movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall
behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.

  The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced
student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or
Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in the
morning in a beer-garden even after four hours of Mounet Sully at the
Theatre Francais. In those branches, education might be called closed.
Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything worth knowing to a man
who, holding open the door into the next world, regarded himself as
merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The glance was more
amusing than any he had known in his active life, but it was
more--infinitely more--chaotic and complex.

  Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or there-abouts,
he had been repeating that he really must go to Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs.
Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him come. He joined them,
parents and children, alert and eager and appreciative as ever, at the
little old town of Rothenburg-on-the Taube, and they went on to the
Baireuth festival together.

  Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would have
opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different
from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth
seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Brunhilde, perhaps even
for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world, calm, contemplative, and
remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed, and Wagner had become
a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo
element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna--perhaps the
Potomac itself--had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, and
one could hardly listen to the "Gotterdammerung" in New York, among
throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous
excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as
though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be
whatever one pleased--venal, sordid, vulgar--but society nursed there,
in the rottenness of its decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and
thought them proof of art. Perhaps they were; and at all events, Wagner
was chiefly responsible for them as artistic emotion. New York knew
better than Baireuth what Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris
had more than once included the rising of the Seine to drown out the
Etoile or Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts
spells of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery
in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would surely
happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening at Baireuth,
or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with catastrophe as though it
were an old mistress--faced it almost gaily as she had done so often,
for they were acquainted since Rome began to ravage Europe; while New
York met it with a glow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable
earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made
nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the
accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had
lost its charm, but the Fluch-motif went home.

  Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become
a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy; though not
with socialism, which, to young men who nourished artistic emotions
under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest
middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly
new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore
true poetry under the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a
party saw no inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and
audience were--relatively--stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.

  Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had supposed
himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau Wagner and the
Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the Senator, yearning for
sterner study, pointed to a haven at Moscow. For years Adams had taught
American youth never to travel without a Senator who was useful even in
America at times, but indispensable in Russia where, in 1901,
anarchists, even though conservative and Christian, were ill-seen.

  This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian anarchist,
as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer rightly understood.
By the necessity of their philosophical descent, each member of the
fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty task and
inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no third member could be so much as
considered, since the great principle of contradiction could be
expressed only by opposites; and no agreement could be conceived,
because anarchy, by definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the
kinetic theory of a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction
was itself agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent
with freedom; but the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement
provided it were strictly confined to the end of larger contradiction.
Thus the great end of all philosophy--the "larger synthesis"--was
attained, but the process was arduous, and while Adams, as the older
member, assumed to declare the principle, Bay Lodge necessarily denied
both the assumption and the principle in order to assure its truth.

  Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and
Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the end; and, to
hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to concentrate energy;
to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces; to reduce
friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because this
was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but
partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and
some others complained of; and finally--and chiefly--because a rigorous
philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and satisfy
man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate
contradiction.

  Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this
scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but such
objection meant only that the critic should begin his education in any
infant school in order to learn that anarchy which should be logical
would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian anarchist,
the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian
mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise
their innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee Reclus were ideals of
the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois
dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of anarchy except
as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither of them had
formed any other conception of the universe than what they had
inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously
belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist, or collectivist,
the mind that followed nature had no relation; if anarchists needed
order, they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had
enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian
anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faith except the
nature of nature itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault
of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty
could scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only
the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order--except the
Church--had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the conservative
Christian anarchist to prove his own.

  Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner or
Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men have been
mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such refinements
were Greek or German, and affected the practical American but little.
He admitted that, for the moment, the darkness was dense. He could not
affirm with confidence, even to himself, that his "largest synthesis"
would certainly turn out to be chaos, since he would be equally obliged
to deny the chaos. The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of
thought for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a
hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and
already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the
riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to
blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to
increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.

  Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to
Russia in order to enlarge his "synthesis"--and much he needed it! In
America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the faith was
national, racial, geographic. The true American had never seen such
supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades between social anarchy
and social order as to mark it for exclusively human and his own. He
never had known a complete union either in Church or State or thought,
and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to
meet any contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly
the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire was
a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history
than all the complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts,
sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These were Nature--pure and anarchic as
the conservative Christian anarchist saw Nature--active, vibrating,
mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first
glimpse one caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning,
of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird
horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle
and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St.
Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic.
Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that
history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilization in
Europe, and had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever
known such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution
whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in
the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth.
Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia
became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity
as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out--an
inert residuum--with movement of pure inertia. From the car window one
seemed to float past undulations of nomad life--herders deserted by
their leaders and herds--wandering waves stopped in their
wanderings--waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them
westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had
lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence.
They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and
could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy
like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and
snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day, in the
Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study
Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh
his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in
words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkin answered every purpose.

  The Russian people could never have changed--could they ever
be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up, or
take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller scale, the
question was old and unanswered. All the so-called primitive races, and
some nearer survivals, had raised doubts which persisted against the
most obstinate convictions of evolution. The Senator himself shook his
head, and after surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to
St. Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff.
Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had been
immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the people
seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or fifteen years
of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for, since 1898,
Russia lagged.

  The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed disposed
to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For him, all opinion
founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be complete,
and their relations must be always infinite. Very likely, Russia would
instantly become the most brilliant constellation of human progress
through all the ordered stages of good; but meanwhile one might give a
value as movement of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow
acceleration that would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap
between east and west relatively the same. This result reached, the
Lodges thought their moral improvement required a visit to Berlin; but
forty years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams's memories of
Berlin, and he preferred, at any cost, to escape new ones. When the
Lodges started for Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed
happily, in a day or two, at Stockholm.

Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he gains
little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt whether
Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand Duke, or the
Emperor, knew much more about it than their neighbors; and Adams was
quite sure that, even in America, he should listen with uncertain
confidence to the views of any Secretary of the Treasury, or railway
president, or President of the United States whom he had ever known,
that should concern the America of the next generation. The mere fact
that any man should dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to
judge. Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of
unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she represented
three-fourths of the human race, and her movement might be the true
movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration of
America. No one could yet know what would best suit humanity, and the
tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught himself talking as
bear or as monkey according to the mirror he held before him. "Am I
satisfied?" he asked:--

                          "Moi? pourquoi non?
  N'ai-je pas quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres?
  Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproche;
  Mais pour mon frere l'ours, on ne l'a qu'ebauche;
  Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."

  Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in
details, his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or
decorative, nor was he in the least sure what form it might take even
in one generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of three. No
man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would do to him; but
so much was sure; the monkey and motor were terribly afraid of the
bear; how much,--only a man close to their foreign departments knew. As
the monkey looked back across the Baltic from the safe battlements of
Stockholm, Russia looked more portentous than from the Kremlin.

  The image was that of the retreating ice-cap--a wall of
archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever at its
mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that crossed the
level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea, merely extended the
northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and Poles on one side still
struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained their own
energies under the same conditions that caused inertia across the
frontier. Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race;
and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it
should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the
sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very
existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue,
history was a nursery tale.

  The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous mass of
inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever Russia moved.
From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it were an ice-sheet,
and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries. In contrast with the
dreary forests of Russia and the stern streets of St. Petersburg,
Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and Sweden lured the tourist on.
Through a cheerful New England landscape and bright autumn, he rambled
northwards till he found himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway.
Education crowded upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these
vast surfaces of history about which he had lectured and read for a
life-time. When the historian fully realizes his ignorance--which
sometimes happens to Americans--he becomes even more tiresome to
himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible. Adams
could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse
doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors
whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced
Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and,
under their illusions, he took the mail steamer to the north, and on
September 14, reached Hammerfest.

  Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the deep
fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and reindeer were
watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate channels outside, as
their ancestors had watched the first Norse fishermen learn them in the
succession of time; but it was not the Laps, or the snow, or the arctic
gloom, that impressed the tourist, so much as the lights of an
electro-magnetic civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia,
which more and more insisted on taking the first place in historical
interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously corrected the errors
of the old, or so effectively redressed the balance of the ecliptic. As
one approached the end--the spot where, seventy years before, a futile
Carlylean Teufelsdrockh had stopped to ask futile questions of the
silent infinite--the infinite seemed to have become loquacious, not to
say familiar, chattering gossip in one's ear. An installation of
electric lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar
ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer
Teufelsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent
electric lights of Hammerfest.

  He had good reason--better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever
told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without means of
speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to
gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, breakfasting in the
restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across, the neighboring
table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, announcing an attempt on the
life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Trondhjem, and so up
the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling of the
President's condition, and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt,
until at last a little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven,
announcing the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death
of McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth of
wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends, sent
to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to correct
the faults of the solar system. The electro-dynamo-social universe
worked better than the sun.

  No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines of
unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across the gulf
to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an abyss. Russia
was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial ice-cap still
pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision, and no one could
look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these spectral islands
without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward would
bring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which
obliged tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen
had stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost.
Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to make
of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian fishermen
ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands, jammed with their
faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the ice-cap of Russian inertia
pressing from behind, and the ice a trifling danger compared with the
inertia. From the day they first followed the retreating ice-cap round
the North Cape, down to the present moment, their problem was the same.

  The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line
of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession,
divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate or geography or
soil.

  The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered south
again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne. A mere
glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind. Hamburg was
almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the green rusticity of
Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham. The Rhine in
1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as it resembled the Rhine of the
Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway centre that had completed its
cathedral which bore an absent-minded air of a cathedral of Chicago.
The thirteenth century, carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked
up, was visible to tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling,
curiosity. The Rhine was more modern than the Hudson, as might well be,
since it produced far more coal; but all this counted for little beside
the radical change in the lines of force.

  In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the
Danube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric
highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade-route followed the old
routes of invasion, and Cologne was a resting-place between Warsaw and
Flanders. Throughout northern Germany, Russia was felt even more
powerfully than France. In 1901 Russia had vanished, and not even
France was felt; hardly England or America. Coal alone was felt--its
stamp alone pervaded the Rhine district and persisted to Picardy--and
the stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The Rhine
produced the same power, and the power produced the same people--the
same mind--the same impulse. For a man sixty-three years old who had no
hope of earning a living, these three months of education were the most
arduous he ever attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel
he ever met; but the sum of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable.
From Hammerfest to Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean--from Halifax to
Norfolk on the other--one great empire was ruled by one great
emperor--Coal. Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or
divide it, but the power and the empire were one. Unity had gained that
ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there an older, perhaps a surer, power,
resting on the eternal law of inertia, held its own.

  As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers
became more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian inertia was
moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in its path. As long
as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de Witte fall, Hay would
totter. One could only sit down and watch the doings of Mr. de Witte
and Mr. de Plehve.

Adams considers the achievements of his friend John Hay, Secretary of State from 1898 until his death in 1905. Hay's participation in the Open Door Policy regarding China, the quelling of the Boxer Rebellion, and the planning of the Panama Canal are of particular interest. While Henry does not always agree with Hay, he admires the leadership that his friend gives the country. The contrast between unity and multiplicity takes on added meaning for Henry. He attempts to place the concepts within the Hegelian dialect of contradiction.

Writing initially for a circle of relatively close friends, the narrator continues his habit of fleetingly mentioning events as if the reader is thoroughly familiar with them. Here, they have to do with John Hay's tenure as Secretary of State. Under President McKinley, Hay established an Open Door policy  in China. This was designed to guarantee equal trade opportunities for all interested countries. Adams is concerned that his friend is taking too great a risk because of China's defensive posture toward its traditionally hostile neighbor Japan and toward the West. Hay succeeds in gaining support from the major powers. Germany, Russia, France, and Japan, for example, all have interests in expanded trade with China. Britain has secretly been advocating its own "open" policy. The problem is that the Chinese themselves are not so enthusiastic. Adams writes a long, sardonic letter to Hay warning that the "Open Door" may be off its hinges and Hay left with nowhere to turn. But Hay persists. A secret organization of Chinese, called the Righteous and Harmonious Fists  begins to terrorize Christian missionaries whom the Boxers see as representing Western efforts to exploit the nation. In June of 1900, the Dowager Empress officially supports the Boxers and orders that all foreigners be killed. The Legations in Peking , the Chinese capital, are filled with refugees. Rumors spread that the Boxers have massacred countless refugees, stirring talk of revenge around the world. Through diplomatic channels, Hay manages to spread the word that the Legations are safe. A relief expedition consisting of troops from the major powers occupies Peking on August 14, forcing China to agree to peace terms. Hay insists on the territorial and administrative integrity of China. China is forced to pay damages, but Hay sees to it that the United States uses its share to provide scholarships to Chinese students who want to study in America. He writes Adams that he feels it is worth all the risks to be a part of the opening of China, an issue that will still be controversial more than a century later. McKinley is assassinated in September 1901, a few months into his second term. His vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, takes the oath of office on September 14. Under the administrations of McKinley and Roosevelt, with the leadership of Hay, the United States becomes a prestigious international power. In 1901, Hay also negotiates the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, opening the way for the construction of the Panama Canal. Adams sees that the science and technology of his youth are in their twilight and accepts the dawn of the age of electricity with mixed feelings. He continues his early efforts to formulate a new understanding of history. He sees unity in medieval Christianity. God is one: The cross, the chalice, the Gothic cathedral and the Virgin all are one. In the new science, he sees multiplicity. Education in the new era tends toward complexity, even confusion, which he sees as necessary and positive. The opposite of confusion is not clarity but ignorance. Henry looks to the German philosopher Hegel  and his theory of historical development. Put simply, Hegel maintains that development begins with a thesis. In opposition to it is an antithesis. This conflict results in a synthesis, which serves as the future thesis, to be confronted in the next step. According to the Hegelian approach, the old thesis here is unity. The new antithesis is multiplicity. Henry cannot see what the future synthesis will be; to him, in 1901, it appears to be chaos: "He admitted that, for the moment, the darkness was dense. He could not affirm with confidence, even to himself, that his 'largest synthesis' would certainly turn out to be chaos, since he would be equally obliged to deny the chaos." If Adams seems confusing as the reader struggles to understand, keep in mind that he, too, is struggling and confused. He begins by saying that the answer he seeks probably does not exist. The approach is filled with paradox: Learning results in ignorance; ignorance is wisdom; order leads to chaos. Adams would not be disappointed if his readers came away with the conclusion that the only truth is that there is no truth. At this point, perhaps it all amounts to Teufelsdrockh. But Adams has not finished his search for a theory of history. Indeed, he has barely begun. Glossary Teufelsdrockh  devil's dung. The central character in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus . paroxysm a sudden attack, as of a disease or a sudden outburst, as of laughter. opprobrium the disgrace or infamy attached to shameful conduct. culbute  somersault; downfall. ontologist one who studies ontology, the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being or reality. orthodox conforming to the usual beliefs or established doctrines. Gotterdammerung  twilight of the Gods; the total, usually violent, collapse of a society, regime, or institution. philistine a person regarded as smugly narrow and conventional in views and taste.


THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)

  AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the
activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans ignore
tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the
world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death
as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political
murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have
thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House.

  The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of his
son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that of his
chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his recovery." The
world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have acquired the funeral
habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him yesterday, and he did not
know me." Among the letters of condolence showered upon him was one
from Clarence King at Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace and
tenderness--the old King manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till
nature and the foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of King
impressed him intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said--"the
best and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often sickened
me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind luck; hounded
by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he
was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering alone and
uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ca vous amuse, la vie?"

  The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on
the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's funeral, and
from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel than that which
led to Washington, where a revolution had occurred that must in any
case have made the men of his age instantly old, but which, besides
hurrying to the front the generation that till then he had regarded as
boys, could not fail to break the social ties that had till then held
them all together.

  Ca vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt half
glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only to save
himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure loss. On
that side, his education had been finished at school. His friends in
power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total wreck by
trying to save them.

  As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them
at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken seriously
in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new one. Power
when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all
Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was
more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within
the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that
belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that mediaeval theology
assigned to God--he was pure act. With him wielding unmeasured power
with immeasurable energy, in the White House, the relation of age to
youth--of teacher to pupil--was altogether out of place; and no other
was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, while Adams's ceased
of itself. History's truths are little valuable now; but human nature
retains a few of its archaic, proverbial laws, and the wisest courtier
that ever lived--Lucius Seneca himself--must have remained in some
shade of doubt what advantage he should get from the power of his
friend and pupil Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he
received Nero's filial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the
vast circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a
friend lost--a fact very much worth insisting upon--while the
gray-headed moth that had fluttered through many moth-administrations
and had singed his wings more or less in them all, though he now slept
nine months out of the twelve, acquired an instinct of
self-preservation that kept him to the north side of La Fayette Square,
and, after a sufficient habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred
him from hovering between them.

  Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound
to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is
poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an
almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but
also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of
seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding
it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives
depend on snatching the carrion. Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct
nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally in restless agitation
that would have worn out most tempers in a month, and his first year of
Presidency showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The
effect of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
because it must represent the same process in society, and the power of
self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the control of the
infinite.

  Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but
this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of
history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The personal
lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason why
Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result was mathematically
certain. With Hay, it was only the steady decline of strength, and the
necessary economy of force; but with Lodge it was law of politics. He
could not help himself, for his position as the President's friend and
independent statesman at once was false, and he must be unsure in both
relations.

  To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great--much
greater than that of the usual Senator--but it hung on his position in
Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive patronage; and
his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure. Nowhere in America
was society so complex or change so rapid. No doubt the Bostonian had
always been noted for a certain chronic irritability--a sort of
Bostonitis--which, in its primitive Puritan forms, seemed due to
knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of himself.
Many years earlier William M. Evarts had pointed out to Adams the
impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The
trait led to good ends--such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and
George Washington--but the virtue was exacting; for New England
standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and
constantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened
to become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough--State
Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old Congregational clergy
another; Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in social influence,
a third; the foreign element, especially the Irish, held aloof, and
seldom consented to approve any one; the new socialist class, rapidly
growing, promised to become more exclusive than the Irish. New power
was disintegrating society, and setting independent centres of force to
work, until money had all it could do to hold the machine together. No
one could represent it faithfully as a whole.

  Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the
task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that
of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for study, or
a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two.
Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature
of teaching--Boston incarnate--the child of his local parentage; and
while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous,
was--as Adams admitted in his own case--restless. An excellent talker,
a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear
mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease
whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of
temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose
as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the
still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and
historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his
thought--saturated with English literature, English tradition, English
taste--revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and
Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy
among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare--standing first on the
social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning;
shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license
of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always
intelligent--Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual
statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's
plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He
betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they
dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adams briefly comments on the "hideous political murders" of three Presidents of the United States assassinated in office in Henry's lifetime: Abraham Lincoln , James Garfield , and William McKinley . He sees 1901 as a year of tragedy, including the deaths of John Hay's son, Del, and one of Henry's best friends, Clarence King. Adams occasionally demonstrates remarkable prescience regarding political developments in the coming century, here accurately predicting the importance of Germany's relationship with France and England. Henry's theory of history continues to develop within the context of paradox.

As the new century progresses, Adams becomes nearly obsessed with endings and beginnings, deaths and rebirths. At the age of sixty-four, he sees his own life, and the life of his generation, in its twilight. He and his young country have lived through three presidential assassinations; the lesson, if any, is that life goes on. "America has always taken tragedy lightly," he observes; the country is too busy with progress to mourn long. He mentions a nation of "twenty-million-horse-power," indicating the beginning of a new age; the horsepower of the motors in a single city will surpass this number within a few decades. Clarence King's demise especially saddens him because King was "the best and brightest" of Henry's generation. All of this is significant because Adams is reevaluating his life as well as his view of history. Part of Henry's response is admittedly personal, but it comes at a time when the world is changing even more dramatically than usual. Adams often is at his best when he discusses politics or higher education. In this chapter, he demonstrates remarkable foresight regarding Europe in the twentieth century: "Either Germany must destroy England and France to create the next inevitable unification as a system of continent against continent -- or she must pool interests." It would take two world wars and nearly ninety years for the nations involved to figure that out -- the "unification" finally attempted through the European Union. England's Winston Churchill will see things Adams's way before 1950, but even that influential figure cannot gather enough support to bring Europe together. The chapter's title can be understood only as part of a paradox: The height of knowledge is the abyss of ignorance. By that, Adams means that a person really cannot know anything until he realizes that he knows nothing. He finds this to be especially true as a historian in 1902. Values are reversed, as the old knowledge is found inadequate. Out of the abyss will come Henry's new, dynamic theory of history. Within this context, Adams begins to divide the social evolution of mankind into what Ernest Samuels calls a "complex power system resembling a kind of gravitational field." According to Henry's theory, the first phase of development ran from the beginning of time until 3,000 B.C., about the date of the pyramids. This involved the biological evolution of the species and the gathering of forces such as fire, language, religion, domesticated animals, and milled grain used for food. The second phase in what Adams calls his "chart of relations" ran to about 1,000 A.D. and was involved primarily with learning to use force and energy more economically. Adams later will mention development of metals, more sophisticated use of tools, and the spread of writing as examples of this period. The third phase ran to about 1800. Here the Church reigned as force but began declining under secular influences and emphasis on a nature-centered rather than God-centered universe; the importance of science exacerbated the Church's situation. Mechanical forces began to take over during the fourth phase, running from 1800 to 1900. Henry is not able to see the future clearly. He is still working toward his dynamic theory, the beginning of which must be recognition of the abyss of ignorance. Glossary Ca vous amuse, la vie?  So, does life amuse you?  neurosis any of various mental disorders including anxiety, compulsions, phobias, and depression. Lucius Seneca  Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman. Ordered to commit suicide by his former student and supposed friend, Nero Claudius. Nero Claudius  emperor of Rome , notoriously cruel and depraved. wanton undisciplined; unmanageable.