The Education of Henry Adams
Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden calves to worship. They had
lost the sense of worship; for the idea that they worshipped money
seemed a delusion. Worship of money was an old-world trait; a healthy
appetite akin to worship of the Gods, or to worship of power in any
concrete shape; but the American wasted money more recklessly than any
one ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant
court aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not
what to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make more,
or throw it away. Probably, since human society began, it had seen no
such curious spectacle as the houses of the San Francisco millionaires
on Nob Hill. Except for the railway system, the enormous wealth taken
out of the ground since 1840, had disappeared. West of the Alleghenies,
the whole country might have been swept clean, and could have been
replaced in better form within one or two years. The American mind had
less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its
loss more easily; but it had been deflected by its pursuit till it
could turn in no other direction. It shunned, distrusted, disliked, the
dangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in history for its
ignorance of the past.
Personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's
notice. His first step, on returning to Washington, took him out to the
cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see the bronze figure which St.
Gaudens had made for him in his absence. Naturally every detail
interested him; every line; every touch of the artist; every change of
light and shade; every point of relation; every possible doubt of St.
Gaudens's correctness of taste or feeling; so that, as the spring
approached, he was apt to stop there often to see what the figure had
to tell him that was new; but, in all that it had to say, he never once
thought of questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the
one commonplace about it--the oldest idea known to human thought. He
knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man, woman, or
child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more than a glance to
reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura Daibuts; from
Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to Shelley, art had wrought
on this eternal figure almost as though it had nothing else to say. The
interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of
the observer. As Adams sat there, numbers of people came, for the
figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know
its meaning. Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were
vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would
have been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese
jinricksha-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a
lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions there, and,
apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately
against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism,
of denial. Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought. Like
all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more. The
American layman had lost sight of ideals; the American priest had lost
sight of faith. Both were more American than the old, half-witted
soldiers who denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which
should have been given for drink.
Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain
of self-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to which all
others were subservient, and which absorbed the energies of some sixty
million people to the exclusion of every other force, real or
imaginary. The power of the railway system had enormously increased
since 1870. Already the coal output of 160,000,000 tons closely
approached the 180,000,000 of the British Empire, and one held one's
breath at the nearness of what one had never expected to see, the
crossing of courses, and the lead of American energies. The moment was
deeply exciting to a historian, but the railway system itself
interested one less than in 1868, since it offered less chance for
future profit. Adams had been born with the railway system; had grown
up with it; had been over pretty nearly every mile of it with curious
eyes, and knew as much about it as his neighbors; but not there could
he look for a new education. Incomplete though it was, the system
seemed on the whole to satisfy the wants of society better than any
other part of the social machine, and society was content with its
creation, for the time, and with itself for creating it. Nothing new
was to be done or learned there, and the world hurried on to its
telephones, bicycles, and electric trams. At past fifty, Adams solemnly
and painfully learned to ride the bicycle.
Nothing else occurred to him as a means of new life. Nothing
else offered itself, however carefully he sought. He looked for no
change. He lingered in Washington till near July without noticing a new
idea. Then he went back to England to pass his summer on the Deeside.
In October he returned to Washington and there awaited the reelection
of Mr. Cleveland, which led to no deeper thought than that of taking up
some small notes that happened to be outstanding. He had seen enough of
the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of
bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.
CHAPTER XXII
CHICAGO (1893)
DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle--and during
this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel
fin-de-siecle--where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or
fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had
long ceased going into society. For years he had not dined out of his
own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct
statesman. He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to
newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a
man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.
His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a
meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but
existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him.
Of the society favorites who made the life of every dinner-table and of
the halls of Congress--Tom Reed, Bourke Cockran, Edward Wolcott--he
knew not one. Although Calvin Brice was his next neighbor for six
years, entertaining lavishly as no one had ever entertained before in
Washington, Adams never entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivalled
Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of
the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief,
President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or
Blaine or Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No
one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without
returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was
unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.
Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is
not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to
pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social offences
were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than himself; but a few
houses always remained which he could enter without being asked, and
quit without being noticed. One was John Hay's; another was Cabot
Lodge's; a third led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of
educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politician who
had done most to block his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of
Pennsylvania had married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman
of Ohio, thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics,
and in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron and
Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without succession, as
the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both of them had been kind
to Adams, and a dozen years of this intimacy had made him one of their
habitual household, as he was of Hay's. In a small society, such ties
between houses become political and social force. Without intention or
consciousness, they fix one's status in the world. Whatever one's
preferences in politics might be, one's house was bound to the
Republican interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay,
and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all,
and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The relation
was daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or patronage, since
Mr. Harrison, in those respects, showed little more taste than Mr.
Cleveland for the society and interests of this particular band of
followers, whose relations with the White House were sometimes comic,
but never intimate.
In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South
Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point on
St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken, with the
rest, to open the new experience. From there he went on to Havana, and
came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near April. In May the
Senator took his family to Chicago to see the Exposition, and Adams
went with them. Early in June, all sailed for England together, and at
last, in the middle of July, all found themselves in Switzerland, at
Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt. On July 22 they drove across the
Furka Pass and went down by rail to Lucerne.
Months of close contact teach character, if character has
interest; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since
it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President Grant. Perhaps
it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood of Adam and Eve, the
primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the blood of the cottager
working against the blood of the townsman; but whatever it was, one
liked it for its simplicity. The Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was
not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but in practical
matters it was the steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most
efficient; certainly the safest.
Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never
been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical
Pennsylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard, Benjamin
Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of Albert Gallatin,
indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an elaborate picture, only
to show that he was, if American at all, a New Yorker, with a
Calvinistic strain--rather Connecticut than Pennsylvanian. The true
Pennsylvanian was a narrower type; as narrow as the kirk; as shy of
other people's narrowness as a Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan
farmer. To him, none but Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, negro,
Dago, Italian, Englishman, Yankee--all was one in the depths of
Pennsylvanian consciousness. The mental machine could run only on what
it took for American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's study
of President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was
admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same
lines. Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when he
allied his interests. He then became supple in action and large in
motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he happened to be
right--which was, of course, whenever one agreed with him--he was the
strongest American in America. As an ally he was worth all the rest,
because he understood his own class, who were always a majority; and
knew how to deal with them as no New Englander could. If one wanted
work done in Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a New Englander