The Education of Henry Adams
of man--a property which no one else had right to dispute; and this
personal triumph left him a little cold towards the other diplomatic
results of the war. He knew that Porto Rico must be taken, but he would
have been glad to escape the Philippines. Apart from too intimate an
acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas, he knew the
West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the American
people might think or say about it, they would sooner or later have to
police those islands, not against Europe, but for Europe, and America
too. Education on the outskirts of civilized life teaches not very
much, but it taught this; and one felt no call to shoulder the load of
archipelagoes in the antipodes when one was trying painfully to pluck
up courage to face the labor of shouldering archipelagoes at home. The
country decided otherwise, and one acquiesced readily enough since the
matter concerned only the public willingness to carry loads; in London,
the balance of power in the East came alone into discussion; and in
every point of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the
result as though one had shared in the danger, instead of being
vigorously employed in looking on from a great distance. After all,
friends had done the work, if not one's self, and he too serves a
certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they made a
sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms rivalling those
of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many beautiful places
scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler or more genial than
Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the Saxons, its avenues, its
terraces, its deer-park, its large repose on the Kentish hillside, and
its broad outlook over what was once the forest of Anderida. Filled
with a constant stream of guests, the house seemed to wait for the
chance to show its charms to the American, with whose activity the
whole world was resounding; and never since the battle of Hastings
could the little telegraph office of the Kentish village have done such
work. There, on a hot July 4, 1898, to an expectant group under the
shady trees, came the telegram announcing the destruction of the
Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen Elizabeth in 1588; and
there, later in the season, came the order summoning Hay to the State
Department.
Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as he.
No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries of State,
or how little strength he had in reserve against it. Even at Surrenden
he showed none too much endurance, and he would gladly have found a
valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on both sides was earnest,
but the decided voice of the conclave was that, though if he were a
mere office-seeker he might certainly decline promotion, if he were a
member of the Government he could not. No serious statesman could
accept a favor and refuse a service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in
that case he must resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen
fascination for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old
drawback of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes, even
though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him, no doubt,
the service, though hard, might bring some share of profit, but for the
friends who gave this unselfish decision, all would prove loss. For
one, Adams on that subject had become a little daft. No one in his
experience had ever passed unscathed through that malarious marsh. In
his fancy, office was poison; it killed--body and soul--physically and
socially. Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in
proportion as it held more power; but the poison he complained of was
not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for
that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison
was that of the will--the distortion of sight--the warping of mind--the
degradation of tissue--the coarsening of taste--the narrowing of
sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed no office in order
to wield influence. For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting
for him to stoop to it; he enjoyed more than enough power without
office; no one of his position, wealth, and political experience,
living at the centre of politics in contact with the active party
managers, could escape influence. His only ambition was to escape
annoyance, and no one knew better than he that, at sixty years of age,
sensitive to physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality,
vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost of life.
Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made pretence of
gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and
lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the lighter for
their humor, and his obedience to the President's order was the
gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark views, too,
not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, while Hay had at least
the honors of office, his friends would share only the ennuis of it;
but, as usual with Hay, nothing was gained by taking such matters
solemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left their mark of military
drill on every one who lived through it. He shouldered his pack and
started for home. Adams had no mind to lose his friend without a
struggle, though he had never known such sort of struggle to avail. The
chance was desperate, but he could not afford to throw it away; so, as
soon as the Surrenden establishment broke up, on October 17, he
prepared for return home, and on November 13, none too gladly, found
himself again gazing into La Fayette Square.
He had made another false start and lost two years more of
education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics nor
society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do with Hay's
politics at home or abroad, and never affected agreement with his views
or his methods, nor did Hay care whether his friends agreed or
disagreed. They all united in trying to help each other to get along
the best way they could, and all they tried to save was the personal
relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten had he not been
helped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her
husband into the habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend
off for an hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay
afterwards, and a chat with any one who called.
For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits which
were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right to be called
pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued nothing, but drifted as
attraction offered itself. The short session broke up the Washington
circle, so that, on March 22, Adams was able to sail with the Lodges
for Europe and to pass April in Sicily and Rome.
With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had
left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860,
but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and
violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its study
on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy, without a shade of
sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse teaches
more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli
seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to a centre,
for every new journey led back to its steps--Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi,
Mycenæ, Constantinople, Syracuse--all lying on the road to the
Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not
yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral; and New York
sent most of all, for, in forty years, America had made so vast a
stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant
horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic of Brutus and
Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius
Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school
history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as
familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under
Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year,
as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.
Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
obvious--in no way unpleasant--truth; therefore one sat silent as ever
on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added
a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose
solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory--or
sufficient--ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and
better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St.
Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh
cross-lights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the
astonishing contrast between what he had taught then and what he found
himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years
afterwards--between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of
his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes
of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of
derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and
Soc:--
HIC JACET
HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
DOCTOR BARBARICUS
HENRICUS ADAMS
ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
PRIMO EXPLICUIT
SOCNAM
The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as
satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of
Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a
shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of
view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph
Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the
clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one
had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School,
because one could see no other path to a profession.
The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own.
St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the
whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with
a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no
meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered. He
passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with the last at
Surrenden; but the solitude did what the society did not--it forced and
drove him into the study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last he
entered the practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could
no longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a methodical
survey--a triangulation--of the twelfth century. The pursuit had a
singular French charm which France had long lost--a calmness, lucidity,
simplicity of expression, vigor of action, complexity of local color,
that made Paris flat. In the long summer days one found a sort of
saturated green pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in
the little twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassuming as
their own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches;
but churches were many and summer was short, so that he was at last
driven back to the quays and photographs. For weeks he lived in silence.