Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single
gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for
all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary
machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers,
churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force
submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere
law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the
one he liked least, but his likes and dislikes were as antiquated
as the rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had
been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by
capital and by capitalistic methods.[703]
But while he clung tenaciously to his obsolete prejudices in favor of
an earlier century, the pugnacious realism of that century was oozing
out of him. The middle years of his life, between the acceptance of the
Harvard post in 1870 and the final break with Victorianism in 1892,
were intellectually an unhappy period. He was losing his grasp on
realities and becoming narrowly and exclusively political-minded. It
was not good for him to live daily in the presence of politics. In so
“far as he had a function in life,” he said of the Henry Adams of 1877.
“it was as stable-companion to statesmen, whether they liked it or
not.”[704] The term “statesmen” was of course only a polite euphemism
for the breed of politicians who played their sordid game under his
critical eyes. He was rarely under any illusions in regard to them
except when blinded by friendship. Certainly his etchings of Grant and
Blaine and Sherman and Conkling and other servants of democracy were
done with acid.
Yet in all his penetrating comment on men and measures there is a
curious failure to take into account the economic springs of action. He
had let slip the clue old John Adams had followed so tenaciously. An
acute historian, not thus wanting, would never have traced the triumph
of the gold standard to the “mere law of mass,” would never have
substituted a physical determinism for an economic, would never have
confused the principle of mass with a minority. How far an intelligent
man and a competent historian could go astray in his criticism of
current ways is suggested by the curious novel _Democracy_, that he
wrote in 1880 while living in the daily companionship of John Hay and
Clarence King. In dealing with the phenomena of political corruption
he had none of the acuteness of old John Taylor of Carolina, who would
have put his finger unerringly on the cause, or of the first Adams. If
he had written _Democracy_ after he had studied the funding operations
of the Federalists under Hamilton’s leadership, very likely he would
have dealt with the problem more searchingly; but in 1880 Henry Adams
revealed no more critical intelligence than did Godkin or Lowell or
other critics of the Gilded Age.
The historical work done during those middle years at Washington
was abundant and excellent, marked by rigorous use of sources, a
dispassionate attitude towards partisan issues, and excellent form.
It was easy for an Adams to take middle ground between Jefferson and
Hamilton, however much his sympathies inclined to the former. In
all this work, however, in the _Life of Albert Gallatin_ (1879), in
_John Randolph_ (1882), as well as in the nine-volume _History of the
United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison_
(1889-1891), the point of view remains too narrowly political, with the
result that it fails to thrust into adequate relief the economics of
the great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism; and without that
clue the interpretation is wanting in substantial realism.
By 1891 he was convinced that he had got all he could from the curdled
milk of politics, and he became dissatisfied with his work. There can
be little doubt that it was a growing realization of the inadequacy
of his analysis of social forces that determined him to abandon the
field he had tilled so long and set about the business of reëducating
himself. If _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ and _The Education_ tell
anything about Henry Adams they reveal that his dissatisfactions
welled up from deep springs within himself--from the consciousness
of his failure to penetrate beneath the surface, to probe the hidden
forces that move the puppets on the historical stage. He had long
been seeking an adequate philosophy of history--for a unity behind
the multiplicity--and in these early years of the nineties he was
stimulated by Brooks Adams, who was then deep in his theory of the law
of civilization and decay and had come to lean heavily on the principle
of economic determinism.[705] “Brooks Adams had taught him,” he said
later, “that the relation between civilizations was that of trade,” and
stimulated by this rediscovery of the philosophy of the first Adams he
set about the business of orienting himself to the realm of science,
of substituting for a meaningless political interpretation a broader
philosophical interpretation.
Very likely it was his reading in the sociology of the Enlightenment
that first turned his thought to the philosophy of history--chiefly
Turgot and Comte. Speaking of the years 1867-1868 he said he “became
a Comteist, within the limits of evolution.”[706] He had long been
interested in such clues as science offered--in the geological theories
of Sir Charles Lyell and the biological deductions of Darwin. But the
theory of biological evolution with its implications of a benevolent
progress from the simple to the complex, failed to satisfy him; and
he turned to the physical sciences for a guide, discovering as the
ultimate reality behind all appearances--force. This physical principle
he transferred to the field of sociology. Coal-power, electrical
power, he concluded, were to civilization what the gaseous theory was
to physics. It was a creative suggestion and it revolutionized his
conception of history. It runs through all his later speculations and
provided the basis of his thinking. “Adams never knew why,” he said,
“knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday’s trick of
seeing lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of
will.”[707] “To evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution;
to historians the single interest is the law of reaction between
force and force--between mind and nature--the law of progress.”[708]
“The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte
first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of
progress.”[709]
Thus by the aid of the physical sciences Henry Adams came back to
the philosophy of determinism--a conception that may lead either to
pantheism or to mechanism as one’s temperament determines. In such a
choice there would be no doubt which way Henry Adams would go; he must
somehow reconcile determinism and progress, he must discover unity
in multiplicity--and that unity and progress he found in a mystical
pantheism. “Continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable
force. This was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist ... and their
deity was the ultimate energy, whose thought and action were one.”[710]
How creatively this pantheistic mysticism was to determine his later
thinking is sufficiently revealed in the pages of _Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres_. With incredible labor Henry Adams had at last made his
way out of the Sahara of politics in which he had long wandered.
Phrased in less transcendental terms his philosophy of history, as he
came finally to understand it, was expressed thus:
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.[711]
From a civilization thus tyrannized over by coal-power and electrical
power, he turned away to discover if possible a civilization in which
men had lived the good life that he longed for; and in his second
incursion into medieval times he found what he had long been seeking.
Two centuries, from 1050 to 1250, came to represent for him in the
evening of his days the crown and glory of all human endeavor; the
first century with its Norman Mont-Saint-Michel and its _Chanson de
Roland_, with its forthright strength and simplicity, its uncritical
acceptance of life and God, its hope encompassed by a sufficing
unity--a strong, naïve, credulous world, yet with men’s minds
buttressed like their cathedrals by a faith that held in equilibrium
the soaring arches of their aspirations, with every cranny and nook
flooded with radiant color: and the second century, that expressed
itself in the cathedral of Chartres, with its adoration of the Virgin,
its courtly love of Guillaume de Lorris and Marie de Champagne, its
passionate mysticism of Saint Louis and Saint Bernard and Saint
Francis, and its soaring scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas--a tender,
feminine age, that worshiped woman and erected its altars to Our Lady
of Love rather than to Our Lady of Sorrows, that found in Isolde the
ideal woman and expressed itself in Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche
of Castile, in Héloïse and Marie de Champagne, more adequately than
in Richard Cœur-de-Lion, till it finally went the way of mortality
“with the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things about the
year 1250”:--to such idealization of medievalism did this child of
Puritanism come in the wistful twilight of his days. He had never
evaded life, nor professed himself satisfied with mean or cheap
substitutes, but had sought persistently till he had come to believe
that the good life had been lived once, though it might not ever be
lived again. So much at least was clear gain, even though it should end
in wistfulness.
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ is a beautiful book, the more
beautiful because of its wistfulness; and the theme that runs through
its pages is a denial of the values that embodied for his countrymen
the sum of all excellence. It is an account of certain happy
generations--so few amongst the countless many--who worshiped in love,
before fear had come to the western world and crept into the message
of the church; a love that elevated Mother Mary above the Christ of
the Cross, and that in her shrine at Chartres would allow no hint of
sorrow or suffering to appear, but represented her as looking out upon
the world with a gracious and regal kindliness and mercy, quick to
succor and to forgive--the spirit of love that suffices life in all its
needs. _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ is rich and tender and wise,
perhaps beyond anything else that his generation of Americans wrote,