The Education of Henry Adams
French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St.
Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more
than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity;
their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their decorative
sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the force that
created it all--the Virgin, the Woman--by whose genius "the stately
monuments of superstition" were built, through which she was expressed.
He would have seen more meaning in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo,
who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was
lost even upon the artist.
Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500s
he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an image
of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis XI. In
mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by chance to the
twentieth century, and forgotten where it came from. He writhed and
cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did at his own, but in the
opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered
in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devoured by
curiosity to think like Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from
birth, and Adams's instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but
half of a nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of
Amiens they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them
one; but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel of
force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of taste.
For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the
horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monument.
Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so American that,
for at least forty years, Adams had never realized that any other could
be in sound taste. How many years had he taken to admit a notion of
what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but
he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus
as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres--perhaps at
Lourdes--possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely
naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles--but otherwise one must look for force to
the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the
German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less
sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the
Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power--only as
reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely
even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all
other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a
railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the
world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.
Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man
all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured
force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was
the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician
cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no
symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work.
The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as
the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by
ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the
greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's
activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the
track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to;
its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents,
conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could
hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly
than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as
a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were
occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the
Virgin easiest to handle.
The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last
to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand
in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as
stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with
the instinct of despair could one force one's self into this old
thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed a score of entrances
more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere,
unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of
study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one
controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of
force controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of
education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled
over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force
almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of
blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen
works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material
over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never
arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist
knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and
shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to
return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The
result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what
is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their
play or variety. Compelled once more to lean heavily on this support,
Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures as formal as though
they were algebra, laboriously striking out, altering, burning,
experimenting, until the year had expired, the Exposition had long been
closed, and winter drawing to its end, before he sailed from Cherbourg,
on January 19, 1901, for home.
CHAPTER XXVI
TWILIGHT (1901)
WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted
meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the Paris
Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and Besnard,
the world that thought itself serious, and showed other infallible
marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at Peking
and elsewhere such as startled even itself. Of all branches of
education, the science of gauging people and events by their relative
importance defies study most insolently. For three or four generations,
society has united in withering with contempt and opprobrium the
shameless futility of Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du Barry; yet, if one
bid at an auction for some object that had been approved by the taste
of either lady, one quickly found that it were better to buy
half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas, or all the
philosophy and science of their time, than to bid for a cane-bottomed
chair that either of these two ladies had adorned. The same thing might
be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire; while, as every one knows,
the money-value of any hand-stroke of Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or
Sir Joshua, is out of all proportion to the importance of the men.
Society seemed to delight in talking with solemn conviction about
serious values, and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most
futile. The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle for the
control of China, which, in his view, must decide the control of the
world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China was chiefly studied in
Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese porcelain. The value of a
Ming vase was more serious than universal war.
The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on
future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more
about it than though he were the best-informed statesman in Europe.
Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations were massacred,
and that John Hay, who alone championed China's "administrative
entity," would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on, in
impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China, and shut up
America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten, in Europe, accepted this
result in advance, seeing no way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and
laughed at Hay for his helplessness.
When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on, as
incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on that
branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing so
meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On returning to
Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the world as astonished
as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a moment, indeed, the world
had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put Europe aside and set the
Washington Government at the head of civilization so quietly that
civilization submitted, by mere instinct of docility, to receive and
obey his orders; but, after the first shock of silence, society felt
the force of the stroke through its fineness, and burst into almost
tumultuous applause. Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century,
with all its painful scuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the
American blushed to be told of his submissions in the past. History
broke in halves.
Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of
his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh
life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic, and
depression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles nested at
home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's diplomatic court had
become the largest in the world, and the diplomatic relations required
far more work than ever before, while the staff of the Department was
little more efficient, and the friction in the Senate had become
coagulated. Hay took to studying the "Diary" of John Quincy Adams
eighty years before, and calculated that the resistance had increased
about ten times, as measured by waste of days and increase of effort,
although Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly
treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing him, and proved it,
for the effort of the afternoon walk became sometimes painful.
For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly
team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole load and
turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and Holleben helped
the Senate to make what trouble they could, without serious offence,
and the Irish, after the genial Celtic nature, obstructed even
themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks to their sympathetic qualities,
never made lasting enmities; but the Germans seemed in a fair way to
rouse ill-will and even ugly temper in the spirit of politics, which
was by no means a part of Hay's plans. He had as much as he could do to
overcome domestic friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreign
powers. Yet so much could be said in favor of the foreigners that they
commonly knew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive.
Cassini had for years pursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of
his own, never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief as