Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
with a mellow scholarship that walks modestly because it has learned
how little it knows. Yet in its every implication it is a sharp and
searching criticism of Boston and America of the nineteenth century. It
repudiates every ideal of a generation that had gambled away the savor
of life--that does not comprehend “and never shall,” the greatness of
that earlier time, “the appetite” for living, the “greed for novelty,”
“the fun of life.”[712] It was precisely these things, unimportant
though they might seem to the acquisitive mind, that Henry Adams had
missed in his own life and passionately resented having missed. To come
to know great men and great deeds and great ages is perhaps of doubtful
expediency for one who must live amongst small men; and Henry Adams
was forced to pay a heavy penalty for his catholic understanding and
sympathy.
The profound suggestiveness of _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ lies in
the skill with which the brilliant threads of medieval art and thought
and aspiration are woven into a single pattern, and the splendor of its
unity traced to a mystical _élan_ that found its highest expression
in faith. It was the ideal of love that he discovered in the golden
twelfth century--love above law, above logic, above the church and the
schools: a love that explains for him the passionate worship of Mother
Mary, together with the new “_courtoisie_” that sought to shape manners
and morals to humane ends. The humanity of the Virgin set her above
the Trinity, as the humanity of Saint Francis set him above Thomas
Aquinas, for all the latter’s soaring scholasticism. To one who entered
those bygone times through the portals of Chartres cathedral, it was
natural to interpret the total age in the light of the gentle smile of
the Mother of God, and to feel her presence as a transforming spirit
amongst men. Has any other Yankee interpreted so lovingly the mission
of the Virgin, as Henry Adams analyzed it in such a passage as this?
True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the
Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason,
behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored
her with a passion such as no other deity has ever inspired: and
why we, although utter strangers to her, are not far from getting
down on our knees and praying to her still. Mary concentrated
in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole
protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as
its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating
itself against the walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized
by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a door of escape. She
was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turning hell into an
ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social distinction
in this world and the next. She knew that the universe was as
unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her
worshippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it
was any more intelligible to the Creator of it. To her, every
suppliant was a universe in himself, to be judged apart, on his
own merits, by his love for her,--by no means on his orthodoxy,
or his conventional standing in the Church, or according to his
correctness in defining the nature of the Trinity. The convulsive
hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination--as
you can see at Lourdes--was due much less to her power of saving
soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under
law,--divine or human,--justly or unjustly, by accident or design,
by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw
for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her
friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the
sins of their ancestors or the peccadilloes of Eve.
So Mary filled heaven with a sort of persons little to the taste
of any respectable middle-class society, which has trouble enough
in making this world decent and pay its bills, without having to
continue the effort in another. Mary stood in a Church of her own,
so independent that the Trinity might have perished without much
affecting her position; but, on the other hand, the Trinity could
look on and see her dethroned with almost a breath of relief....
Mary’s treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no
favours to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven
by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that
three hundred years later the Puritan reformers were not satisfied
with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether
as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The Puritans
abandoned the New Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to
the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve.[713]
Thus at last, in another land and a remote age, Henry Adams found
the clue that explained for him his own failure and the source of
the dissatisfactions that had tracked him doggedly through his far
wanderings. He had come to understand the reasons for the sterility of
his Massachusetts past, and the last shreds of his Puritan-Federalist
heritage were cast off. In comparison with the vision that came to
him in the choir of Chartres, how unspeakably poor and mean were
the activities he had portrayed in _Democracy_, or even those he
had dealt with in his history of the early days of the republic. He
had discovered the highest existence in emotional response to noble
appeal; the good life was the unified life, possible only on a grand
scale in those rare and great periods of social _élan_ when the
individual is fused in an encompassing unity. Of that golden age of
the Transition--so he finally cast up the account--“the sum is an
emotion--clear and strong as love and much clearer than logic whose
charm lies in its unstable balance.”
The Transition is the equilibrium between the love of God--which
is faith--and the logic of God--which is reason; between the round
arch and the pointed. One may not be sure which pleases most, but
one need not be harsh toward people who think that the moment
of balance is exquisite. The last and highest moment is seen at
Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the constant doubt
whether emotion or science is uppermost. At Amiens, doubt ceases;
emotion is trained in school, Thomas Aquinas reigns.[714]
Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the
Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the
slender nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap
downwards of the flying buttress,--the visible effort to throw off
a visible strain,--never let us forget that Faith alone supports
it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is
visibly delicate beyond the line of safety; danger lurks in every
stone. The peril of the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the
vagrant buttress; the uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of
the syllogism, the irregularities of the mental mirror,--all these
haunting nightmares of the Church are expressed as strongly by the
Gothic cathedral as though it had been the cry of human suffering,
and as no emotion had ever been expressed before or is likely to
find expression again. The delight of its aspiration is flung up
to the sky. The pathos of its self-distrust and anguish of doubt
is buried in the earth as its last secret. You can read out of it
whatever else pleases your youth and confidence; to me, this is
all.[715]
One may enter the past, of course, through such portals as one chooses;
but one is likely to choose the portals that promise to open upon the
world of one’s desires. It was a fortunate accident, no doubt, that
led Henry Adams to Chartres to study the cathedral glass under the
guidance of John La Farge; nevertheless it finally determined for him
his total interpretation of the Middle Ages and of all history, and
that interpretation followed naturally a subtle ancestral bias. Even
in his rebellion against his past he could not get away from it, but
like Ruskin and John Henry Newman he came to affirm--whether rightly
or wrongly, who shall say?--that the singular glory of the Middle Ages
was the mystical _élan_ that came to expression in the adoration of the
Virgin. As a child of generations of Puritans he came back finally, in
the twilight of his studies, to the great ideal of faith. And yet it
is not without suggestion that William Morris, who more nearly than
any other modern expressed in his daily life the spirit of the Middle
Ages, never concerned himself much with the medieval church--neither
its cathedrals nor its scholasticism nor its miracles--never talked
about an age of faith, would scarcely have understood, indeed, what
was meant by the drive of a mystical _élan_; but discovered the secret
of that earlier civilization in the gild rather than the church, and
traced the source of the haunting beauty that clings to all its works
to the psychology of craftsmanship that found delight in shaping the
raw material to the craftsman’s dreams.
The difference between Morris and Adams is great enough, and at
bottom it is the difference between the artist and the intellectual;
yet it is a pity that Henry Adams, with his wide acquaintance in
England, should never have known the one Victorian he should most
have delighted in--the nineteenth-century craftsman who found in his
workshop the good life the historian dreamed of, and was unhappy
because it had been lost. Perhaps it would not have greatly changed the
latter’s interpretation. He was not a pagan in temperament to enter
sympathetically into the medieval world that Morris had discovered and
of which the Church was only a drapery--a drapery that never quite
covered a frank _joie de vivre_ that was an emotion far more realistic
and human than any mystical _élan_, and that persisted long after the
apogee of faith in the early twelfth century, filling all the later
Middle Ages with its abundant beauty till it was finally destroyed by
the economic revolution that came out of the Reformation. But at any
rate he might have been led by such knowledge to set the craftsman
beside the poet and the schoolman and the mystic--the nameless artist
who wrought such marvels beside the patron who took care to have his
name and his arms emblazoned on window and wall to remind posterity
of his generosity; and certainly, his interpretation of the Middle
Ages would not have suffered by such addition. Instead, an excessive
intellectualism drove him back upon the naïve.
The disillusion of Henry Adams is abundantly instructive to the student
of our flamboyant transition, so different from the golden Transition.
Here was an honest man and an able--none honester and none abler in
his generation--who devoted his life to finding a path out of the maze
of middle-class America, that should lead to a rational and humane
existence. He was never overconfident of his conclusions. All arrogant
dogmatisms he had long since left behind; they had become for him
pathetically futile and foolish. Creeds and faiths, whether in religion
or politics or economics, he no longer subscribed to; but a certain
residuum remained, from his long meditations--a sense of interfusing
unity, mystical, pantheistic, that his lurking skepticism dealt
tenderly with. “_Inter vania nihil vanius est homine_,” he asserted as
a skeptic, and as a mystic he replied, “Man is an imperceptible atom
always trying to become one with God. If ever modern science achieves
a definition of energy, possibly it may borrow the figure: Energy is
the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.”[716] In