The Education of Henry Adams
His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new value.
Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since 1850 John La
Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat at
his feet since 1872, the question how much he owed to La Farge could be
answered only by admitting that he had no standard to measure it by. Of
all his friends La Farge alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast
against the commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had
vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The
American mind--the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western--likes
to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it
takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional
analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional
expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality. The
most disconcerting trait of John La Farge was his reversal of the
process. His approach was quiet and indirect; he moved round an object,
and never separated it from its surroundings; he prided himself on
faithfulness to tradition and convention; he was never abrupt and
abhorred dispute. His manners and attitude towards the universe were
the same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sketching
the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of sea-sickness, or
drinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of Japan, or sipping his
cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of Samoan chiefs, or reflecting
under the sacred bo-tree at Anaradjpura.
One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but always
there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it flowed, for
even a contradiction was to him only a shade of difference, a
complementary color, about which no intelligent artist would dispute.
Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams, you reason too much!" was one
of his standing reproaches even in the mild discussion of rice and
mangoes in the warm night of Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed
Adams for being born in Boston. The mind resorts to reason for want of
training, and Adams had never met a perfectly trained mind.
To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone--a shade--a
nuance--and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of course
all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, but
few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive
between their art and their talk. One evening Humphreys Johnston, who
was devoted to La Farge, asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge
was ill--more ill than usual even for him--but he admired and liked
Whistler, and insisted on going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to
overhear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear that
of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At that moment the Boer War was
raging, and, as every one knows, on that subject Whistler raged worse
than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed against England--witty,
declamatory, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and noisy; but in substance
what he said was not merely commonplace--it was true! That is to say,
his hearers, including Adams and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed
with it all, and mostly as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent,
and this difference of expression was a difference of art. Whistler in
his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point
reached by La Farge, or even attempted; but in talk he showed, above or
below his color-instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real
eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed.
This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his painting,
La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value of La
Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams was too
ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible more
ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to the twelfth
century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt at home, but felt
a sort of ownership. No other American had a right there, unless he too
were a member of the Church and worked in glass. Adams himself was an
interloper, but long habit led La Farge to resign himself to Adams as
one who meant well, though deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, though
near sixty years old before he knew anything either of glass or of
Chartres, asked no better than to learn, and only La Farge could help
him, for he knew enough at least to see that La Farge alone could use
glass like a thirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been dead
for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge felt the
early glass rather as a document than as a historical emotion, and in
hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and Paris, Adams knew
barely one or two that were meant to hold their own against a
color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La Farge's mind was
opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color
toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it
was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and
vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.
Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a step
backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health became more and more
alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back to New York,
January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to Washington to find
out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could be hoped, for Hay's
troubles had begun, and were quite as great as he had foreseen. Adams
saw as little encouragement as Hay himself did, though he dared not say
so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness in supporting
him, and the loyalty of his party friends; but all this worry on Hay's
account fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War did on his own.
Here was a problem in his political education that passed all
experience since the Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to his
astonishment, very few Americans seemed to share his point of view;
their hostility to England seemed mere temper; but to Adams the war
became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from childhood,
even in England, that his forbears and their associates in 1776 had
settled, once for all, the liberties of the British free colonies, and
he very strongly objected to being thrown on the defensive again, and
forced to sit down, a hundred and fifty years after John Adams had
begun the task, to prove, by appeal to law and fact, that George
Washington was not a felon, whatever might be the case with George III.
For reasons still more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain
question of the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even
further, and avow the opinion that if at any time England should take
towards Canada the position she took towards her Boer colonies, the
United States would be bound, by their record, to interpose, and to
insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him the
attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed exceedingly
un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.
Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue,
and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could
never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical
objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms. Hay's
chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck should turn, and
to him the only object was time; but as political education the point
seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shutting his eyes or denying an
evident fact. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but
education and politics are two different and often contradictory
things. In this case, the contradiction seemed crude.
With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram Hewitt,
Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden--men who played the game for
ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the
professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of
the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of
the work. In return, the professionals felt no great love for them, and
set them aside when they could. Only their control of money made them
inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. The story
of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman series, and that
of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside the one; President
Harrison set aside the other. "There is no politics in it," was his
comment on Hay's appointment to office. Hay held a different opinion
and turned to McKinley whose judgment of men was finer than common in
Presidents. Mr. McKinley brought to the problem of American government
a solution which lay very far outside of Henry Adams's education, but
which seemed to be at least practical and American. He undertook to
pool interests in a general trust into which every interest should be
taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should, under
his management, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results.
How much they cost was another matter; if the public is ever driven to
its last resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the result will
probably cost more.
Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of whom
was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and his task
hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by simply paying
their price; but abroad whatever helped on one side, hurt him on
another. Hay thought England must be brought first into the combine;
but at that time Germany, Russia, and France were all combining against
England, and the Boer War helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally,
abroad or at home, except Pauncefote, and Adams always maintained that
Pauncefote alone pulled him through.
Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more unmanageable,
even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was less the fault of
the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of peace, in any normal state
of things," said Hay, "ought to be ratified with unanimity in
twenty-four hours. They wasted six weeks in wrangling over this one,
and ratified it with one vote to spare. We have five or six matters now
demanding settlement. I can settle them all, honorably and
advantageously to our own side; and I am assured by leading men in the
Senate that not one of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the
Senate. I should have a majority in every case, but a malcontent third
would certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the
original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of our
politics. You must understand, it is not merely my solution the Senate
will reject. They will reject, for instance, any treaty, whatever, on
any subject, with England. I doubt if they would accept any treaty of
consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrant third would be
differently composed, but it would be on hand. So that the real duties
of a Secretary of State seem to be three: to fight claims upon us by
other States; to press more or less fraudulent claims of our own