The Education of Henry Adams
with Hay; he made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious objects;
but Senators could seldom give a reason for obstruction. In every
hundred men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, and try to invent
reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no worse than the
board of a university; but incorporators as a rule have not made this
class of men dictators on purpose to prevent action. In the Senate, a
single vote commonly stopped legislation, or, in committee, stifled
discussion.
Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations,
and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant
obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience and bargaining in
executive patronage, if indeed it could be overcome at all. The price
actually paid was not very great except in the physical exhaustion of
Hay and Pauncefote, Root and McKinley. No serious bargaining of
equivalents could be attempted; Senators would not sacrifice five
dollars in their own States to gain five hundred thousand in another;
but whenever a foreign country was willing to surrender an advantage
without an equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty.
In all such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the
Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of time
and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed Hay; "the
Major will have promised all the consulates in the service; the
Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe me dis-consulate; I
shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by one, by the thirty-four
per cent of kickers and strikers; the only mitigation I can foresee is
being sick a good part of the time; I am nearing my grand climacteric,
and the great culbute is approaching."
He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight--the solitary
picturesque and tragic element in politics--incidentally requiring
character-studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and
Webster and Sumner, with Sir Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and
stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of
Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades,
Falstaffs, and Malvolios--endless varieties of human nature nowhere
else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or
because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is so gay
and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely, but
what he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the vast
mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly complained that it had made
him a bore--of all things the most senatorial, and to him the most
obnoxious. The old friend was lost, and only the teacher remained,
driven to madness by the complexities and multiplicities of his new
world.
To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great value
except as measures of mass and motion. For him the practical interest
and the practical man were such as looked forward to the next election,
or perhaps, in corporations, five or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen
men in America could be named who were known to have looked a dozen
years ahead; while any historian who means to keep his alignment with
past and future must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he
seeks to align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of
some sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every
historian--sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably--must have
put to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn
system last? He can never give himself less than one generation to show
the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to triangulate
from the widest possible base to the furthest point he thinks he can
see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon.
To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right--if
the question of right or wrong enters at all into the matter--the
historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in his own profession
few companions offer help, and his walk soon becomes solitary, leading
further and further into a wilderness where twilight is short and the
shadows are dense. Already Hay literally staggered in his tracks for
weariness. More worn than he, Clarence King dropped. One day in the
spring he stopped an hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and
simply telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his
lungs. All three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that
if it were not the one it would be the other; but the affectation of
readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid resource,
though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed of it even in the
acting.
The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that
a share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared
from their lives; but Hay had still his family and ambition, while
Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, his eyes
rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie
of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to
reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far
look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the
passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to
fall into King's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left
in life. Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so
little when others knew so much, crushed out hope.
He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest toy he
knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played since babyhood,
the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk with magnets, and
mapped out their lines of force by compass. Then he read all the books
he could find, and tried in vain to makes his lines of force agree with
theirs. The books confounded him. He could not credit his own
understanding. Here was literally the most concrete fact in nature,
next to gravitation which it defied; a force which must have radiated
lines of energy without stop, since time began, if not longer, and
which might probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
earth, since no one knew why--or how--or what it radiated--or even
whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of all natural
forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have suggested no idea to
any one until some mariner bethought himself that it might serve for a
pointer. Another thousand years passed when it taught some other
intelligent man to use it as a pump, supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir
for collecting electricity, still without knowing how it worked or what
it was. For a historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the
invention of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human
ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as his
mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some one,
somewhere, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could but find
the book--although he had been forced to admit the same helplessness in
the face of gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors; and he could
imagine no reason why society should treat radium as revolutionary in
science when every infant, for ages past, had seen the magnet doing
what radium did; for surely the kind of radiation mattered nothing
compared with the energy that radiated and the matter supplied for
radiation. He dared not venture into the complexities of chemistry, or
microbes, so long as this child's toy offered complexities that
befogged his mind beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless
variety of pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He
wanted to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a magnet.
He figured the human mind itself as another radiating matter through
which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.
In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the forces.
To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new relation
staggered his new education by its evidence of growing complexity, and
multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He could not escape it;
politics or science, the lesson was the same, and at every step it
blocked his path whichever way he turned. He found it in politics; he
ran against it in science; he struck it in everyday life, as though he
were still Adam in the Garden of Eden between God who was unity, and
Satan who was complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth.
The problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate
as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and Adams.
All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won. The National Government and the national unity had overcome
every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over
all the curates; yet the greater the unity and the momentum, the worse
became the complexity and the friction. One had in vain bowed one's
neck to railways, banks, corporations, trusts, and even to the popular
will as far as one could understand it--or even further; the
multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was increasing, and
threatened to increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his
favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism--except
for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant
necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and Pteraspis and
ice age and tramways and telephones; and now--just when he was ready to
hang the crowning garland on the brow of a completed education--science
itself warned him to begin it again from the beginning.
Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a
full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a
confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell, and
that it might be worth looking at if only to steady his vision. He read
it again, and thought it better than he could do at sixty-three; but
elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts grown larger, and
became curious to know what had been said about them since 1870. The
Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes, and reading for steady
months; while, the longer he read, the more he wondered, pondered,
doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have
said about it.
Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and
the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve
themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one. Adams
asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted towards unity or
multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would depend on the age of the
man who drifted.
Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the
Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when
geological life was young; as though they had all remained together in
time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat "how