The Education of Henry Adams
like other men who knew less. The method did not result in faith. Indeed,
every increase of mass--of volume and velocity--seemed to bring in new
elements, and, at last, a scholar, fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of
algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of
facts. Nothing came out as it should. In principle, according to
figures, any one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame
no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam
Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the
anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the
ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the
prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the
future; but meanwhile these societies which violated every law, moral,
arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated each other, but
produced also fresh complexities with every propagation and developed
mass with every complexity.
The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying
discovery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as
the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very much
concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the
anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams
disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future
society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at
finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind
march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from
one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason but
temper, falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres had
become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed
up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost
continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South
Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them
all not merely unnecessary, but foolish--induced by greed of the
coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still robbing
their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and inevitable, but the
murder seemed altogether archaic.
At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of
Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral
improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press.
Possibly growth in human nature might show itself there. He found no
need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he preferred
on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment;
and he very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of religious
void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or
even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an act, or an
expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.
The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care for;
if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the mass of
mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics, travel
had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair had only confused
the roads. Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind was
already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of chance
images stored away without order in the memory. One might as well try
to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student
less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself
ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe
with the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is useful to
the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of
this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called
historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The
woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one
or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself. The
American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw
her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth;
none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so
familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to
history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much
better company than the American man; she was probably much better
company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, Senator
since 1893, Adams's relations had been those of elder brother or uncle
since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left his examination-papers on
Assistant Professor Adams's desk, and crossed the street to Christ
Church in Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself, as scholar,
fellow instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and
political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but
with him afterwards as politician he had not much relation; and since
Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not
only a Senator but a Senator from Massachusetts--a singular social
relation which Adams had known only as fatal to friends--a
superstitious student, intimate with the laws of historical fatality,
would rather have recognized him only as an enemy; but apart from this
accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the waste places of average
humanity had been greatly dependent on his house. Senators can never be
approached with safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and
several superior children who feel no deference for Senators as such,
may be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep him
under restraint.
Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it
chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at Caen,
Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history had a chapter
with which he thought himself familiar, it was the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do with knowledge that
these bare playgrounds of the lecture system turned into green and
verdurous virgin forests merely through the medium of younger eyes and
fresher minds. His German bias must have given his youth a terrible
twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessential
because un-German. They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a
compliment which would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or
even in sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life
in trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed
nothing less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in the
touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of the
senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an unusual chance, even
a Senator became natural, simple, interested, cultivated, artistic,
liberal--genial.
Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One could
not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of mere
antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it expelled
archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without seeming conscious
of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington with a new sense of
history. Again he wandered south, and in April returned to Mexico with
the Camerons to study the charms of pulque and Churriguerresque
architecture. In May he ran through Europe again with Hay, as far south
as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage. After thus covering once
more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home in
October, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and start the
world anew.
For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams
wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or
historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything he wanted
to save; and in this respect he reflected only the public mind which
balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both parties as
to express no sympathy with either. Even among the most powerful men of
that generation he knew none who had a good word to say for it. No
period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in American politics since
Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society;
but the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a
small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to depend
abjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged one's self down
the long vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's
friends, and avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown
narrow with years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses
round La Fayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in power
except in the case of Mr. Blaine whose tumultuous struggle for
existence held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House
and laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole
nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the
world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders for London.
Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had been buried in
Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life either at home or
abroad, and broke up his house on the Square. Only the Lodges and
Roosevelts remained, but even they were at once absorbed in the
interests of power. Since 1861, no such social convulsion had occurred.
Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most strongly
the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the man in the
State Department seemed more important than the man in the White House.
Adams knew no one in the United States fit to manage these matters in
the face of a hostile Europe, and had no candidate to propose; but he
was shocked beyond all restraints of expression to learn that the
President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the State Department in
order to make a place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himself had
done nothing that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long
enough to distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not
between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for the
place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was notoriously
feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to Adams the
betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Department. One might
have shrugged one's shoulders had the President named Mr. Hanna his
Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna was a man of force if not of
experience, and selections much worse than this had often turned out
well enough; but John Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down.
The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the
petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor was the matter
improved by hints that the President might call John Hay to the
Department whenever John Sherman should retire. Indeed, had Hay been
even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, he would have put an end,
once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his friend's
part; but even without this last disaster, one felt that Washington had
become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary
contemplation of Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more