The Education of Henry Adams
for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon, while in
foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide as the
world. There the merest scholar could see what he was doing. For
history, international relations are the only sure standards of
movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adams had
always insisted that international relation was the only sure base for
a chart of history.
He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he found
it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as
the historian. Required to look far ahead and round him, he measures
forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less
hostile ever since Congress first sat. The Secretary of State exists
only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather
ignore; of obligations which Congress repudiates whenever it can; of
bargains which Congress distrusts and tries to turn to its advantage or
to reject. Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always
intrigued against the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has
been obliged to extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls
in Senators' service.
This is a matter of history which any one may approve or
dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an old
scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865. Hay had
become the most imposing figure ever known in the office. He had an
influence that no other Secretary of State ever possessed, as he had a
nation behind him such as history had never imagined. He needed to
write no state papers; he wanted no help, and he stood far above
counsel or advice; but he could instruct an attentive scholar as no
other teacher in the world could do; and Adams sought only
instruction--wanted only to chart the international channel for fifty
years to come; to triangulate the future; to obtain his dimension, and
fix the acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he
was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and force.
Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at
last the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he had
achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate, with
only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to renounce, without
equivalent, treaty rights which she had for fifty years defended tooth
and nail. This unprecedented triumph in his negotiations with the
Senate enabled him to carry one step further his measures for general
peace. About England the Senate could make no further effective
opposition, for England was won, and Canada alone could give trouble.
The next difficulty was with France, and there the Senate blocked
advance, but England assumed the task, and, owing to political changes
in France, effected the object--a combination which, as late as 1901,
had been visionary. The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring
Germany into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most
unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed. This
was the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism; the system of
combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home, and realizable
abroad.
With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
century, had nothing to do, and made not the least presence of
meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining governments,
like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist scheme
of Jaures and Bebel. That John Hay, of all men, should adopt a
socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservative Christian
anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy in politics as in
science. When one saw the field, one realized that Hay could not help
himself, nor could Bebel. Either Germany must destroy England and
France to create the next inevitable unification as a system of
continent against continent--or she must pool interests. Both schemes
in turn were attributed to the Kaiser; one or the other he would have
to choose; opinion was balanced doubtfully on their merits; but,
granting both to be feasible, Hay's and McKinley's statesmanship turned
on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the
Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible
alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in Russia. Thus
Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were partners.
The problem was pretty--even fascinating--and, to an old
Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometrical
demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life, it had all sorts of
ultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet--theory and
practice--it risks going astray; and Hay was probably the most
accomplished master of both then living. He knew not only the forces
but also the men, and he had no other thought than his policy.
Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a
scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole educational
staff of the Government at a time when the Government had just reached
the heights of highest activity and influence. Since 1860, education
had done its worst, under the greatest masters and at enormous expense
to the world, to train these two minds to catch and comprehend every
spring of international action, not to speak of personal influence; and
the entire machinery of politics in several great countries had little
to do but supply the last and best information. Education could be
carried no further.
With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its
effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his
ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing--to be groping
in darkness--to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth
consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one knew
more. He had, at least, the mechanical assurance of certain values to
guide him--like the relative intensities of his Coal-powers, and
relative inertia of his Gun-powers--but he conceived that had he known,
besides the mechanics, every relative value of persons, as well as he
knew the inmost thoughts of his own Government--had the Czar and the
Kaiser and the Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught him
all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew nothing
themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the student
measure his own.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
THE years hurried past, and gave hardly time to note their
work. Three or four months, though big with change, come to an end
before the mind can catch up with it. Winter vanished; spring burst
into flower; and again Paris opened its arms, though not for long. Mr.
Cameron came over, and took the castle of Inverlochy for three months,
which he summoned his friends to garrison. Lochaber seldom laughs,
except for its children, such as Camerons, McDonalds, Campbells and
other products of the mist; but in the summer of 1902 Scotland put on
fewer airs of coquetry than usual. Since the terrible harvest of 1879
which one had watched sprouting on its stalks on the Shropshire
hillsides, nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled
to Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much
gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last, in
desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne,
and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better citizen.
Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to Berlin, abandoned
his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers to come, he hid in
ignorance and silence.
Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a
working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift,
the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with
a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as summer taught, winter
tested, and one had only to watch the apparent movement of the stars in
order to guess one's declination. The process is possible only for men
who have exhausted auto-motion. Adams never knew why, knowing nothing
of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force
all about him, where he had always seen lines of will. Perhaps the
effect of knowing no mathematics is to leave the mind to imagine
figures--images--phantoms; one's mind is a watery mirror at best; but,
once conceived, the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of force
presented themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted only as
battle of attractions. By this path, the mind stepped into the
mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a
distinct new phase of education.
This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres.
Like his masters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the
eternal mystery of Force--the sink of all science. For thousands of
years in history, he found that Force had been felt as occult
attraction--love of God and lust for power in a future life. After
1500, when this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on
some vis a tergo--instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's
survival of the fittest; and one of the greatest minds, between
Descartes and Newton--Pascal--saw the master-motor of man in ennui,
which was also scientific: "I have often said that all the troubles of
man come from his not knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness
forces action. "So passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in
order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we
think either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and
even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord
spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature,
and would fill the mind with its venom."
"If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast."
Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change, but failed
to account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force was
essential; a force from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal and all
the old philosophies called this outside force God or Gods. Caring but
little for the name, and fixed only on tracing the Force, Adams had
gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and asked her to show him God,
face to face, as she did for St. Bernard. She replied, kindly as ever,
as though she were still the young mother of to-day, with a sort of
patient pity for masculine dulness: "My dear outcast, what is it you
seek? This is the Church of Christ! If you seek him through me, you are
welcome, sinner or saint; but he and I are one. We are Love! We have
little or nothing to do with God's other energies which are infinite,
and concern us the less because our interest is only in man, and the
infinite is not knowable to man. Yet if you are troubled by your
ignorance, you see how I am surrounded by the masters of the schools!
Ask them!"
The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British
science which had repeated since Bacon that one must not try to know
the unknowable, though one was quite powerless to ignore it; but the
Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of interest in
all perfections except her own was honester than the formal phrase of
science; since nothing was easier than to follow her advice, and turn
to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern physicists, answered at once and
plainly: "To me," said St. Thomas, "Christ and the Mother are one
Force--Love--simple, single, and sufficient for all human wants; but