The Education of Henry Adams
amusing than the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which
offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls
embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely cause
anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!
Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached the
month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years' dogged
effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend it to the
young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had become more
and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the Civil Law had been
locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860. Noah's dove had not
searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so little
success. Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove who wants and finds
rest; but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone and
uneducated, who has lost his taste even for olives. To this, also, the
young may be driven, as education, and the lesson fails in humor; but
it may be worth knowing to some of them that the planet offers hardly a
dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui,
and none at all where he can pass a year.
Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his
years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the task
of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a right to
require amusement--or at least education, since this costs nothing to
any one--and that a world which cannot educate, will not amuse, and is
ugly besides, has even less right to exist than he. Both views seem
sound; but the world wearily objects to be called by epithets what
society always admits in practice; for no one likes to be told that he
is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having nothing to say in its
defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is pardonable in youth, the
man of sixty who wishes consideration had better hold his tongue. This
truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for
men of half that age Only the very young have the right to betray their
ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to
betray themselves.
Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one
point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in others. Of all
characteristics in human nature, this has been one of the most abiding.
Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long history of human
expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid by the wise, shows
that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever existed on this.
"Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he holdeth his peace, is
counted wise," and still more often, the wisest of men, when he spoke
the highest wisdom, has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the
merits of silence in others. Socrates made remarks in its favor, which
should have struck the Athenians as new to them; but of late the
repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlyle vociferated his
admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best form of
expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of
expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most noble to
the end. Alfred de Vigny's dying wolf remarked:--
"A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse."
"When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,
Only silence is strong,--all the rest is but lies."
Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have decided
to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm that--
"The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen
Than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest;"
with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The evidence
of the poets could not be more emphatic:--
"Silent, while years engrave the brow!
Silent,--the best are silent now!"
Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in
silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all
philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, had ever
been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few were believed to
have attained ignorance, which was in result the same. More than this,
in every society worth the name, the man of sixty had been encouraged
to ride this hobby--the Pursuit of Ignorance in Silence--as though it
were the easiest way to get rid of him. In America the silence was more
oppressive than the ignorance; but perhaps elsewhere the world might
still hide some haunt of futilitarian silence where content
reigned--although long search had not revealed it--and so the
pilgrimage began anew!
The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in London
that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about it;
education could not be expected there; but there Adams arrived, April
21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many days, for Queen
Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in St. James's Street.
True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets of Rome, actually
squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like Odysseus before
the press of shadows, daunted by a "bloodless fear"; but in spring
London is pleasant, and it was more cheery than ever in May, 1897, when
every one was welcoming the return of life after the long winter since
1893. One's fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes, were again in flood.
This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars
better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled
Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled Venus to show
him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a sort
of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris, and set up a household at
St. Germain where he taught and learned French history for nieces who
swarmed under the venerable cedars of the Pavillon d'Angouleme, and
rode about the green forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time
to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the
summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel at
home in France as in other countries he had thought more homelike. At
length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because he could go
nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hays came by, in January,
1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a stanch and strong ally for twenty
years, bade him go with them to Egypt.
Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and what
they said had as little to do with education as possible, until one
evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the Nile from
Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to announce the sinking
of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the greatest stride in
education since 1865, but what did it teach? One leant on a fragment of
column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep down the
debris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the same
wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of
silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx.
Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between civilizations was
that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He
tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to
Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of Tiryns;
together they went on to Constantinople and studied the great walls of
Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian. His hobby had turned
into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long enough in silence, that at
last he might come on a city of thought along the great highways of
exchange.
CHAPTER XXIV
INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life
to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap in
peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had reason to
be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no such sense of
power and momentum, and had seen no such number of personal friends
wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for much in one's
contentment, but the sense of winning one's game counts for more; and
in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly interesting to the last
survivor of the Legation of 1861. He thought himself perhaps the only
person living who could get full enjoyment of the drama. He carried
every scene of it, in a century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite
alive in his mind--all the interminable disputes of his disputatious
ancestors as far back as the year 1750--as well as his own
insignificance in the Civil War, every step in which had the object of
bringing England into an American system. For this they had written
libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war,
losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle and patient
Puritan nature of their descendants, until even their private
secretaries at times used language almost intemperate; and suddenly, by
pure chance, the blessing fell on Hay. After two hundred years of
stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument and no violence
affected, the people of England learned their lesson just at the moment
when Hay would otherwise have faced a flood of the old anxieties. Hay
himself scarcely knew how grateful he should be, for to him the change
came almost of course. He saw only the necessary stages that had led to
it, and to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still living in the
atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance of
Germany as the grizzly terror which, in twenty years effected what
Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain--frightened England into
America's arms--seemed as melodramatic as any plot of Napoleon the
Great. He could feel only the sense of satisfaction at seeing the
diplomatic triumph of all his family, since the breed existed, at last
realized under his own eyes for the advantage of his oldest and closest
ally.
This was history, not education, yet it taught something
exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For
the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose working
itself out in history. Probably no one else on this earthly planet--not
even Hay--could have come out on precisely such extreme personal
satisfaction, but as he sat at Hay's table, listening to any member of
the British Cabinet, for all were alike now, discuss the Philippines as
a question of balance of power in the East, he could see that the
family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand
perspective of true empire-building, which Hay's work set off with
artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations looked
stronger and larger in scale for the refinement and certainty of the
arcade. In the long list of famous American Ministers in London, none
could have given the work quite the completeness, the harmony, the
perfect ease of Hay.
Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law
in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it, for
chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal property by
inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in the affairs