The Education of Henry Adams
were an old mistress--faced it almost gaily as she had done so often,
for they were acquainted since Rome began to ravage Europe; while New
York met it with a glow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable
earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made
nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the
accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had
lost its charm, but the Fluch-motif went home.
Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become
a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy; though not
with socialism, which, to young men who nourished artistic emotions
under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest
middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly
new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore
true poetry under the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a
party saw no inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and
audience were--relatively--stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.
Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had supposed
himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau Wagner and the
Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the Senator, yearning for
sterner study, pointed to a haven at Moscow. For years Adams had taught
American youth never to travel without a Senator who was useful even in
America at times, but indispensable in Russia where, in 1901,
anarchists, even though conservative and Christian, were ill-seen.
This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian anarchist,
as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer rightly understood.
By the necessity of their philosophical descent, each member of the
fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty task and
inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no third member could be so much as
considered, since the great principle of contradiction could be
expressed only by opposites; and no agreement could be conceived,
because anarchy, by definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the
kinetic theory of a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction
was itself agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent
with freedom; but the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement
provided it were strictly confined to the end of larger contradiction.
Thus the great end of all philosophy--the "larger synthesis"--was
attained, but the process was arduous, and while Adams, as the older
member, assumed to declare the principle, Bay Lodge necessarily denied
both the assumption and the principle in order to assure its truth.
Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and
Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the end; and, to
hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to concentrate energy;
to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces; to reduce
friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because this
was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but
partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and
some others complained of; and finally--and chiefly--because a rigorous
philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and satisfy
man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate
contradiction.
Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this
scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but such
objection meant only that the critic should begin his education in any
infant school in order to learn that anarchy which should be logical
would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian anarchist,
the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian
mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise
their innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee Reclus were ideals of
the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois
dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of anarchy except
as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither of them had
formed any other conception of the universe than what they had
inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously
belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist, or collectivist,
the mind that followed nature had no relation; if anarchists needed
order, they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had
enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian
anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faith except the
nature of nature itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault
of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty
could scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only
the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order--except the
Church--had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the conservative
Christian anarchist to prove his own.
Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner or
Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men have been
mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such refinements
were Greek or German, and affected the practical American but little.
He admitted that, for the moment, the darkness was dense. He could not
affirm with confidence, even to himself, that his "largest synthesis"
would certainly turn out to be chaos, since he would be equally obliged
to deny the chaos. The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of
thought for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a
hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and
already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the
riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to
blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to
increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.
Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to
Russia in order to enlarge his "synthesis"--and much he needed it! In
America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the faith was
national, racial, geographic. The true American had never seen such
supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades between social anarchy
and social order as to mark it for exclusively human and his own. He
never had known a complete union either in Church or State or thought,
and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to
meet any contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly
the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire was
a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history
than all the complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts,
sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These were Nature--pure and anarchic as
the conservative Christian anarchist saw Nature--active, vibrating,
mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first
glimpse one caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning,
of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird
horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle
and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St.
Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic.
Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that
history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilization in
Europe, and had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever
known such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution
whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in
the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth.
Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia
became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity
as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out--an
inert residuum--with movement of pure inertia. From the car window one
seemed to float past undulations of nomad life--herders deserted by
their leaders and herds--wandering waves stopped in their
wanderings--waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them
westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had
lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence.
They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and
could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy
like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and
snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day, in the
Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study
Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh
his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in
words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkin answered every purpose.
The Russian people could never have changed--could they ever
be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up, or
take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller scale, the
question was old and unanswered. All the so-called primitive races, and
some nearer survivals, had raised doubts which persisted against the
most obstinate convictions of evolution. The Senator himself shook his
head, and after surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to
St. Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff.
Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had been
immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the people
seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or fifteen years
of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for, since 1898,
Russia lagged.
The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed disposed
to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For him, all opinion
founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be complete,
and their relations must be always infinite. Very likely, Russia would
instantly become the most brilliant constellation of human progress
through all the ordered stages of good; but meanwhile one might give a
value as movement of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow
acceleration that would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap
between east and west relatively the same. This result reached, the
Lodges thought their moral improvement required a visit to Berlin; but
forty years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams's memories of
Berlin, and he preferred, at any cost, to escape new ones. When the
Lodges started for Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed
happily, in a day or two, at Stockholm.
Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he gains
little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt whether
Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand Duke, or the
Emperor, knew much more about it than their neighbors; and Adams was
quite sure that, even in America, he should listen with uncertain
confidence to the views of any Secretary of the Treasury, or railway
president, or President of the United States whom he had ever known,
that should concern the America of the next generation. The mere fact
that any man should dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to