The Education of Henry Adams
judge. Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of
unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she represented
three-fourths of the human race, and her movement might be the true
movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration of
America. No one could yet know what would best suit humanity, and the
tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught himself talking as
bear or as monkey according to the mirror he held before him. "Am I
satisfied?" he asked:--
"Moi? pourquoi non?
N'ai-je pas quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres?
Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproche;
Mais pour mon frere l'ours, on ne l'a qu'ebauche;
Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."
Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in
details, his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or
decorative, nor was he in the least sure what form it might take even
in one generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of three. No
man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would do to him; but
so much was sure; the monkey and motor were terribly afraid of the
bear; how much,--only a man close to their foreign departments knew. As
the monkey looked back across the Baltic from the safe battlements of
Stockholm, Russia looked more portentous than from the Kremlin.
The image was that of the retreating ice-cap--a wall of
archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever at its
mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that crossed the
level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea, merely extended the
northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and Poles on one side still
struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained their own
energies under the same conditions that caused inertia across the
frontier. Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race;
and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it
should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the
sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very
existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue,
history was a nursery tale.
The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous mass of
inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever Russia moved.
From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it were an ice-sheet,
and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries. In contrast with the
dreary forests of Russia and the stern streets of St. Petersburg,
Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and Sweden lured the tourist on.
Through a cheerful New England landscape and bright autumn, he rambled
northwards till he found himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway.
Education crowded upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these
vast surfaces of history about which he had lectured and read for a
life-time. When the historian fully realizes his ignorance--which
sometimes happens to Americans--he becomes even more tiresome to
himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible. Adams
could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse
doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors
whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced
Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and,
under their illusions, he took the mail steamer to the north, and on
September 14, reached Hammerfest.
Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the deep
fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and reindeer were
watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate channels outside, as
their ancestors had watched the first Norse fishermen learn them in the
succession of time; but it was not the Laps, or the snow, or the arctic
gloom, that impressed the tourist, so much as the lights of an
electro-magnetic civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia,
which more and more insisted on taking the first place in historical
interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously corrected the errors
of the old, or so effectively redressed the balance of the ecliptic. As
one approached the end--the spot where, seventy years before, a futile
Carlylean Teufelsdrockh had stopped to ask futile questions of the
silent infinite--the infinite seemed to have become loquacious, not to
say familiar, chattering gossip in one's ear. An installation of
electric lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar
ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer
Teufelsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent
electric lights of Hammerfest.
He had good reason--better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever
told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without means of
speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to
gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, breakfasting in the
restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across, the neighboring
table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, announcing an attempt on the
life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Trondhjem, and so up
the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling of the
President's condition, and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt,
until at last a little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven,
announcing the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death
of McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth of
wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends, sent
to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to correct
the faults of the solar system. The electro-dynamo-social universe
worked better than the sun.
No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines of
unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across the gulf
to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an abyss. Russia
was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial ice-cap still
pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision, and no one could
look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these spectral islands
without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward would
bring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which
obliged tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen
had stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost.
Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to make
of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian fishermen
ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands, jammed with their
faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the ice-cap of Russian inertia
pressing from behind, and the ice a trifling danger compared with the
inertia. From the day they first followed the retreating ice-cap round
the North Cape, down to the present moment, their problem was the same.
The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line
of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession,
divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate or geography or
soil.
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered south
again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne. A mere
glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind. Hamburg was
almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the green rusticity of
Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham. The Rhine in
1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as it resembled the Rhine of the
Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway centre that had completed its
cathedral which bore an absent-minded air of a cathedral of Chicago.
The thirteenth century, carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked
up, was visible to tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling,
curiosity. The Rhine was more modern than the Hudson, as might well be,
since it produced far more coal; but all this counted for little beside
the radical change in the lines of force.
In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the
Danube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric
highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade-route followed the old
routes of invasion, and Cologne was a resting-place between Warsaw and
Flanders. Throughout northern Germany, Russia was felt even more
powerfully than France. In 1901 Russia had vanished, and not even
France was felt; hardly England or America. Coal alone was felt--its
stamp alone pervaded the Rhine district and persisted to Picardy--and
the stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The Rhine
produced the same power, and the power produced the same people--the
same mind--the same impulse. For a man sixty-three years old who had no
hope of earning a living, these three months of education were the most
arduous he ever attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel
he ever met; but the sum of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable.
From Hammerfest to Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean--from Halifax to
Norfolk on the other--one great empire was ruled by one great
emperor--Coal. Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or
divide it, but the power and the empire were one. Unity had gained that
ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there an older, perhaps a surer, power,
resting on the eternal law of inertia, held its own.
As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers
became more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian inertia was
moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in its path. As long
as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de Witte fall, Hay would
totter. One could only sit down and watch the doings of Mr. de Witte
and Mr. de Plehve.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the
activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans ignore
tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the
world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death
as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political
murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have
thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House.
The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of his
son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that of his
chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his recovery." The
world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have acquired the funeral
habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him yesterday, and he did not
know me." Among the letters of condolence showered upon him was one
from Clarence King at Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace and
tenderness--the old King manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till
nature and the foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of King