The Education of Henry Adams
impressed him intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said--"the
best and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often sickened
me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind luck; hounded
by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he
was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering alone and
uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ca vous amuse, la vie?"
The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on
the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's funeral, and
from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel than that which
led to Washington, where a revolution had occurred that must in any
case have made the men of his age instantly old, but which, besides
hurrying to the front the generation that till then he had regarded as
boys, could not fail to break the social ties that had till then held
them all together.
Ca vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt half
glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only to save
himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure loss. On
that side, his education had been finished at school. His friends in
power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total wreck by
trying to save them.
As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them
at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken seriously
in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new one. Power
when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all
Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was
more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within
the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that
belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that mediaeval theology
assigned to God--he was pure act. With him wielding unmeasured power
with immeasurable energy, in the White House, the relation of age to
youth--of teacher to pupil--was altogether out of place; and no other
was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, while Adams's ceased
of itself. History's truths are little valuable now; but human nature
retains a few of its archaic, proverbial laws, and the wisest courtier
that ever lived--Lucius Seneca himself--must have remained in some
shade of doubt what advantage he should get from the power of his
friend and pupil Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he
received Nero's filial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the
vast circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a
friend lost--a fact very much worth insisting upon--while the
gray-headed moth that had fluttered through many moth-administrations
and had singed his wings more or less in them all, though he now slept
nine months out of the twelve, acquired an instinct of
self-preservation that kept him to the north side of La Fayette Square,
and, after a sufficient habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred
him from hovering between them.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound
to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is
poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an
almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but
also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of
seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding
it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives
depend on snatching the carrion. Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct
nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally in restless agitation
that would have worn out most tempers in a month, and his first year of
Presidency showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The
effect of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
because it must represent the same process in society, and the power of
self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the control of the
infinite.
Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but
this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of
history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The personal
lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason why
Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result was mathematically
certain. With Hay, it was only the steady decline of strength, and the
necessary economy of force; but with Lodge it was law of politics. He
could not help himself, for his position as the President's friend and
independent statesman at once was false, and he must be unsure in both
relations.
To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great--much
greater than that of the usual Senator--but it hung on his position in
Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive patronage; and
his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure. Nowhere in America
was society so complex or change so rapid. No doubt the Bostonian had
always been noted for a certain chronic irritability--a sort of
Bostonitis--which, in its primitive Puritan forms, seemed due to
knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of himself.
Many years earlier William M. Evarts had pointed out to Adams the
impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The
trait led to good ends--such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and
George Washington--but the virtue was exacting; for New England
standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and
constantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened
to become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough--State
Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old Congregational clergy
another; Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in social influence,
a third; the foreign element, especially the Irish, held aloof, and
seldom consented to approve any one; the new socialist class, rapidly
growing, promised to become more exclusive than the Irish. New power
was disintegrating society, and setting independent centres of force to
work, until money had all it could do to hold the machine together. No
one could represent it faithfully as a whole.
Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the
task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that
of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for study, or
a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two.
Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature
of teaching--Boston incarnate--the child of his local parentage; and
while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous,
was--as Adams admitted in his own case--restless. An excellent talker,
a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear
mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease
whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of
temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose
as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the
still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and
historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his
thought--saturated with English literature, English tradition, English
taste--revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and
Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy
among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare--standing first on the
social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning;
shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license
of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always
intelligent--Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual
statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's
plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He
betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they
dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.
Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences
of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were also at variance. He
professed in theory equal distrust of English thought, and called it a
huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac, sometimes precious but never sure. For
him, only the Greek, the Italian or the French standards had claims to
respect, and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to
Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice. He knew that his
artistic standard was the illusion of his own mind; that English
disorder approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French
measure or Italian line, or German logic; he read his Shakespeare as
the Evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very
conservative nor very Christian, but stupendously anarchistic. He loved
the atrocities of English art and society, as he loved Charles Dickens
and Miss Austen, not because of their example, but because of their
humor. He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying
consistency--but he was not a Senator.
Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they
are apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care whether
his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than he;
but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they were always
liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion yield suddenly
under their feet. With this game an elderly friend had long before
carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There was nothing in it for
him but the amusement of the pugilist or acrobat. The larger study was
lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men;
but foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and made personal
relation possible with Hay which could not be maintained with Roosevelt
or Lodge. As an affair of pure education the point is worth notice from
young men who are drawn into politics. The work of domestic progress is
done by masses of mechanical power--steam, electric, furnace, or
other--which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals who
have shown capacity to manage it. The work of internal government has
become the task of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as
heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell
nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of them have
nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in
the development or economy of power. They are trustees for the public,
and whenever society assumes the property, it must confer on them that
title; but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and
will then control society without appeal, as it controls its stokers
and pit-men. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but
of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force,
massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between
the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to
succumb to their own motive forces.
This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially
in mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while
for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that in
domestic politics, every one works for an immediate object, commonly