The Education of Henry Adams
America across the Pacific; and Hay's policy of the open door would
infallibly fail.
Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant
stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany after it
by its mere mass. To the humble student, the loss of Hay's game
affected only Hay; for himself, the game--not the stakes--was the chief
interest; and though want of habit made him object to read his
newspapers blackened--since he liked to blacken them himself--he was in
any case condemned to pass but a short space of time either in Siberia
or in Paris, and could balance his endless columns of calculation
equally in either place. The figures, not the facts, concerned his
chart, and he mused deeply over his next equation. The Atlantic would
have to deal with a vast continental mass of inert motion, like a
glacier, which moved, and consciously moved, by mechanical gravitation
alone. Russia saw herself so, and so must an American see her; he had
no more to do than measure, if he could, the mass. Was volume or
intensity the stronger? What and where was the vis nova that could hold
its own before this prodigious ice-cap of vis inertiae? What was
movement of inertia, and what its laws?
Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he
took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to ask. He
found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men than he. The
dictionary said that inertia was a property of matter, by which matter
tends, when at rest, to remain so, and, when in motion, to move on in a
straight line. Finding that his mind refused to imagine itself at rest
or in a straight line, he was forced, as usual, to let it imagine
something else; and since the question concerned the mind, and not
matter, he decided from personal experience that his mind was never at
rest, but moved--when normal--about something it called a motive, and
never moved without motives to move it. So long as these motives were
habitual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result might,
for convenience, be called movement of inertia, to distinguish it from
movement caused by newer or higher attraction; but the greater the bulk
to move, the greater must be the force to accelerate or deflect it.
This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student and
the professor had gone on complaining that minds were unequally inert.
The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class of minds responded
only to habit; another only to novelty. Race classified thought.
Class-lists classified mind. No two men thought alike, and no woman
thought like a man.
Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying the race
in order to reconstruct it; but surely sex-inertia had never been
overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia, maternity and
reproduction are the most typical, and women's property of moving in a
constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken
and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go on
reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital
condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be
sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The
American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history
mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled
them as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but
if the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race
question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to Americans
vitally. The task of accelerating or deflecting the movement of the
American woman had interest infinitely greater than that of any race
whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or African.
On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was
conscious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As he
grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their interest, but
that Early Women became a passion. Without understanding movement of
sex, history seemed to him mere pedantry. So insistent had he become on
this side of his subject that with women he talked of little else,
and--because women's thought is mostly subconscious and particularly
sensitive to suggestion--he tried tricks and devices to disclose it.
The woman seldom knows her own thought; she is as curious to understand
herself as the man to understand her, and responds far more quickly
than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes, at dinner, one might wait
till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as possible, ask one's liveliest
neighbor whether she could explain why the American woman was a
failure. Without an instant's hesitation, she was sure to answer:
"Because the American man is a failure!" She meant it.
Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American
men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex
who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of view
of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and,
in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of affirming that the
woman was the superior. Apart from truth, he owed her at least that
compliment. The habit led sometimes to perilous personalities in the
sudden give-and-take of table-talk. This spring, just before sailing
for Europe in May, 1903, he had a message from his sister-in-law, Mrs.
Brooks Adams, to say that she and her sister, Mrs. Lodge, and the
Senator were coming to dinner by way of farewell; Bay Lodge and his
lovely young wife sent word to the same effect; Mrs. Roosevelt joined
the party; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped down to escape the
solitude of his wife's absence. The party were too intimate for
reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby with derision which stung
him to pungent rejoinder: "The American man is a failure! You are all
failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here more sense than my brother
Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we all elect Mrs.
Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a
chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the
Embassy, on your way home, and ask which would run it best--Herbert or
his wife?" The men laughed a little--not much! Each probably made
allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior woman. Some one
afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women were not a fair
average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men were above all possible
average; he could not lay his hands on another half-dozen their equals.
Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The
cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was bitter at
heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family together, and
her children ran away like chickens with their first feathers; the
family was extinct like chivalry. She had failed not only to create a
new society that satisfied her, but even to hold her own in the old
society of Church or State; and was left, for the most part, with no
place but the theatre or streets to decorate. She might glitter with
historical diamonds and sparkle with wit as brilliant as the gems, in
rooms as splendid as any in Rome at its best; but she saw no one except
her own sex who knew enough to be worth dazzling, or was competent to
pay her intelligent homage. She might have her own way, without
restraint or limit, but she knew not what to do with herself when free.
Never had the world known a more capable or devoted mother, but at
forty her task was over, and she was left with no stage except that of
her old duties, or of Washington society where she had enjoyed for a
hundred years every advantage, but had created only a medley where nine
men out of ten refused her request to be civilized, and the tenth bored
her.
On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on
this, the opinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a State
Central Committee or a Railway President, is worth less than that of
any woman on Fifth Avenue. The inferiority of man on this, the most
important of all social subjects, is manifest. Adams had here no
occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since no woman in the world
would have paid the smallest respect to the opinions of all professors
since the serpent. His own object had little to do with theirs. He was
studying the laws of motion, and had struck two large questions of
vital importance to America--inertia of race and inertia of sex. He had
seen Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the
value of three thousand million dollars, more or less, upon Russian
inertia, in the last twenty years, and he needed to get some idea of
the effects. He had seen artificial energy to the amount of twenty or
five-and-twenty million steam horse-power created in America since
1840, and as much more economized, which had been socially turned over
to the American woman, she being the chief object of social
expenditure, and the household the only considerable object of American
extravagance. According to scientific notions of inertia and force,
what ought to be the result?
In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown
itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed. The
woman had been set free--volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's perfect gas;
almost brought to the point of explosion, like steam. One had but to
pass a week in Florida, or on any of a hundred huge ocean steamers, or
walk through the Place Vendome, or join a party of Cook's tourists to
Jerusalem, to see that the woman had been set free; but these swarms
were ephemeral like clouds of butterflies in season, blown away and
lost, while the reproductive sources lay hidden. At Washington, one saw
other swarms as grave gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking
themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all these
shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true problem
slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city, town, and
farmhouse, were myriads of new types--or type-writers--telephone and
telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands, running into millions of
millions, and, as classes, unknown to themselves as to historians. Even
the schoolmistresses were inarticulate. All these new women had been
created since 1840; all were to show their meaning before 1940.
Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
century of the Church; but this was probably survival, and gave no hint
of the future. The problem remained--to find out whether movement of
inertia, inherent in function, could take direction except in lines of
inertia. This problem needed to be solved in one generation of American
women, and was the most vital of all problems of force.
The American woman at her best--like most other women--exerted great
charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive type. She appeared
as the result of a long series of discards, and her chief interest lay
in what she had discarded. When closely watched, she seemed making a
violent effort to follow the man, who had turned his mind and hand to
mechanics. The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye
on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average
speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty,
or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or
subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or drugs,
without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine and a woman