The Education of Henry Adams
citizens upon other countries; to find offices for the friends of
Senators when there are none. Is it worth while--for me--to keep up
this useless labor?"
To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it in a
dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred years
before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be humorous. The
intrigue was too open to be interesting. The interference of the German
and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with the press and the
Senate was innocently undisguised. The charming Russian Minister, Count
Cassini, the ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days
pass without appealing through the press to the public against the
government. The German Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously did the
same thing, and of course every whisper of theirs was brought instantly
to the Department. These three forces, acting with the regular
opposition and the natural obstructionists, could always stop action in
the Senate. The fathers had intended to neutralize the energy of
government and had succeeded, but their machine was never meant to do
the work of a twenty-million horse-power society in the twentieth
century, where much work needed to be quickly and efficiently done. The
only defence of the system was that, as Government did nothing well, it
had best do nothing; but the Government, in truth, did perfectly well
all it was given to do; and even if the charge were true, it applied
equally to human society altogether, if one chose to treat mankind from
that point of view. As a matter of mechanics, so much work must be
done; bad machinery merely added to friction.
Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling it
to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all: he laughed and
accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would have gladly lived
his entire life over again exactly as it happened. In the whole New
York school, one met a similar dash of humor and cynicism more or less
pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even the gayest of tempers succumbs
at last to constant friction. The old friend was rapidly fading. The
habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual
humor, the equality of indifference, were sinking into the routine of
office; the mind lingered in the Department; the thought failed to
react; the wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and
the irritations multiplied. To a head of bureau, the result seemed
ennobling.
Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that these
political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and twentieth
centuries should be correlated in some relation of movement that could
be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the
world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough
mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s = gt^2/2.
If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an
obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square could take
liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction
into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even
infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical
formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar universe
weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like this was one in
which he could look for no help from anybody--he could look only for
derision at best.
All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as
futile and almost immoral--certainly hostile to sound historical
system. Adams tried it only because of its hostility to all that he had
taught for history, since he started afresh from the new point that,
whatever was right, all he had ever taught was wrong. He had pursued
ignorance thus far with success, and had swept his mind clear of
knowledge. In beginning again, from the starting-point of Sir Isaac
Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in
Washington cared to overstep the school conventions, and the most
distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to
treat such a scheme seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his
rank in science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams
never enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most
distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more accessible,
to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever he wanted
an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley listened with
outward patience to his disputatious questionings; but he too nourished
a scientific passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its
avowal. He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know
nothing between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great
observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists,
he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of
philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers
to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander
past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as
though recognizing their existence, while doubting their
respectability. He generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to
affirm; and early put into Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern
Science," a volume by Judge Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen
years by the schools with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably
meets every revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.
Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be as
ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant
nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough, or was
too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never to direction or
progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it
could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything
must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure; and
so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more, and found himself on May 12
settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero.
CHAPTER XXV
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to
find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been
grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus
meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley's
behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself
to the skin, for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while
Adams might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the
Milky Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one
might not have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but
though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well as
one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge counted for
nothing until some teacher should show how to apply it. Bacon took a
vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I and his subjects,
American or other, towards the year 1620, that true science was the
development or economy of forces; yet an elderly American in 1900 knew
neither the formula nor the forces; or even so much as to say to
himself that his historical business in the Exposition concerned only
the economies or developments of force since 1893, when he began the
study at Chicago.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked
at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art
Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900.
He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound
attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. Langley, with the ease
of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit
that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw
out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored
almost the whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the
forces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship
feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new
Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a
nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the
electric tram which was only ten years older; and threatening to become
as terrible as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost
exactly Adams's own age.
Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and
explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind,
even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable
volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any
time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To him, the dynamo itself
was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in
a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept
out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As
he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel
the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians
felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its
old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge
wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and
barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a
hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake
the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to
pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man
before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of
ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the
most expressive.
Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar
of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult
mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the
engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal
fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover
between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and
the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but
he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley
could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same
trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were
anarchical, and especially that he was not responsible for the new
rays, that were little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit
towards science. His own rays, with which he had doubled the solar
spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent; but Radium denied
its God--or, what was to Langley the same thing, denied the truths of
his Science. The force was wholly new.
A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as
Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed
himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise
of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped