The Education of Henry Adams
charming is divine philosophy!" He felt almost aggrieved to find
Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the
ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower Trenton
limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by
spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of
known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone
were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for
all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to
hazard even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection
by Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know no more
about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing; but natural
selection that did not select--evolution finished before it
began--minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole
geological record--survival of the highest order in a fauna which had
no origin--uniformity under conditions which had disturbed everything
else in creation--to an honest-meaning though ignorant student who
needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, such sequence
brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused
evolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural
selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted
itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove--to him--that it
had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were
right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in
intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a huge
perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid troubled
Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism
seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of
evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox.
Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own lines
quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up again. A little
more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species.
What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to them;
but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had
begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter of
direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the
glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities.
In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran
about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping
abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and
sequences that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly
become specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an
amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as
they had served when new.
So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of
Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into
half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern
hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the
glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a
horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank,
though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work,
showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans
rose and sank. Lyell's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for
nothing had taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown
young, nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge
overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even
to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that
progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.
Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science
than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no
way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or
discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind
concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern
in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In
thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and
degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites
without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and
had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord
Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this
last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical
Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had
protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological
record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under their
breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on
the tips of their tongues.
Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times
by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
electrolytic--who knew what?--defying science, if not denying known
law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a
"larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into
far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts
to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the
process in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon
reached where larger synthesis is suicide.
Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the
change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any
student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his thought,
should delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion, as he
delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated
statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and
dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this
sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years help
nothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape
floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed
to the end; but they could at least float with the stream if they only
knew which way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh
with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged and
unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it serve? A
seeker of truth--or illusion--would be none the less restless, though a
shark!
CHAPTER XXVII
TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no other
spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side. Even
more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris taught in the
twentieth, with no other school approaching it for variety of direction
and energy of mind. Of the teaching in detail, a man who knew only what
accident had taught him in the nineteenth century, could know next to
nothing, since science had got quite beyond his horizon, and
mathematics had become the only necessary language of thought; but one
could play with the toys of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons
of painting, operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architecture,
theology and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about with Joe
Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying
"Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the charm of youth and the
Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris remained
Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though China fell.
Scores of artists--sculptors and painters, poets and dramatists,
workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs and furniture--hundreds
of chemists, physicists, even philosophers, philologists, physicians,
and historians--were at work, a thousand times as actively as ever
before, and the mass and originality of their product would have
swamped any previous age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the
effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as
before the chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front
of the movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall
behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.
The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced
student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or
Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in the
morning in a beer-garden even after four hours of Mounet Sully at the
Theatre Francais. In those branches, education might be called closed.
Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything worth knowing to a man
who, holding open the door into the next world, regarded himself as
merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The glance was more
amusing than any he had known in his active life, but it was
more--infinitely more--chaotic and complex.
Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or there-abouts,
he had been repeating that he really must go to Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs.
Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him come. He joined them,
parents and children, alert and eager and appreciative as ever, at the
little old town of Rothenburg-on-the Taube, and they went on to the
Baireuth festival together.
Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would have
opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different
from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth
seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Brunhilde, perhaps even
for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world, calm, contemplative, and
remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed, and Wagner had become
a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo
element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna--perhaps the
Potomac itself--had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, and
one could hardly listen to the "Gotterdammerung" in New York, among
throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous
excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as
though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be
whatever one pleased--venal, sordid, vulgar--but society nursed there,
in the rottenness of its decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and
thought them proof of art. Perhaps they were; and at all events, Wagner
was chiefly responsible for them as artistic emotion. New York knew
better than Baireuth what Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris
had more than once included the rising of the Seine to drown out the
Etoile or Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts
spells of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery
in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would surely
happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening at Baireuth,
or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with catastrophe as though it