The Education of Henry Adams
whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the
shores of Quincy Bay.
That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them
should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor
could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden
back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature
he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of
tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Siluria, he understood, Sir
Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Limulus, which helped
nothing. Neither in the Limulus nor in the Terebratula, nor in the
Cestracion Philippi, any more than in the Pteraspis, could one
conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the choice mattered little.
Cousinship had limits but no one knew enough to fix them. When the
vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.
Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of
ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow
shale, as complete as Adams himself--in some respects more so--at the
top of the column of organic evolution: and geology offered no sort of
proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might,
Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure
inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one found a
watch, one inferred a maker. He could detect no more evolution in life
since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the
Abbey. All he could prove was change. Coal-power alone asserted
evolution--of power--and only by violence could be forced to assert
selection of type.
All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir
Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles
labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them
till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams gladly
studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the
day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove
only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform;
and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians--except
Darwin--Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the
Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of
ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in
the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he
felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be
brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey
from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no
more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most was
Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change.
Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass
close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass--or
whatever there was to nibble--in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he
seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of
fishes. He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he
determined to stop it. Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had
any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be
many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of
ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived
and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which
had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to
discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth
was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved
true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for
fun.
From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
as criminal--worse than crime--sacrilege! Society punished it
ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father, looked
on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy him
nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn from
Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on enterprises
great or small. He had no notion of letting the currents of his action
be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him, the current of his
time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology
under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards;
on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of
every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was,
as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their
practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as
though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the
surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young
men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law
should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in
the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy
in order; and he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though
he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million
more lives.
As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he could
not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying it. He,
at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith. The Church
was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded
deeply in interest and law. This was the result of five or six years in
England; a result so British as to be almost the equivalent of an
Oxford degree.
Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who
left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned resolutely to
business, and attacked the burning question of specie payments. His
principles assured him that the honest way to resume payments was to
restrict currency. He thought he might win a name among financiers and
statesmen at home by showing how this task had been done by England,
after the classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the
study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a
morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his
confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British
financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that
the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the
Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were the remedies.
The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis to his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution was
not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever the
last hope of employment in State Street. Six months of patient labor
would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his whole
scheme of making himself a position as a practical man-of-business. If
he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that
moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had
nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone?
Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge
impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or
forgave.
With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821, and,
doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for
choice. He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus
thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to crush the author;
but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic--when successful--than
his ignorance. The editor accepted both.
When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with as
much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The letter
gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the freedom of
the press. These articles, following those on Pocahontas and Lyell,
enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review.
Precisely what this rank was worth, no one could say; but, for fifty
years the North American Review had been the stage coach which carried
literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved. Few
writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development, but for
such as thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An article
was a small volume which required at least three months' work, and was
paid, at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even in England or
France could write a good thirty-page article, and practically no one
in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in search of
items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact, which
was a sort of wild game--a bluefish or a teal--worth anywhere from
fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaper writers had their eye on
quarterly pickings. The circulation of the Review had never exceeded
three or four hundred copies, and the Review had never paid its
reasonable expenses. Yet it stood at the head of American literary
periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it
reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was an
organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in
some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily newspaper.
With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself
what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his
helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No one
could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a
part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might perhaps
have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers or
William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one would have picked out
William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Boston
was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry
Higginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard;
Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start.
Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the
century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could
show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor.
The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks. Had Adams
foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser,
and could have chosen no better path.
Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the
pleasantest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the
Silurian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord
Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background
the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly, and
the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing
that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 was nearly
complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himself
almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before
he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary
could afford to be happy. His old education was finished; his new one
was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end