The Education of Henry Adams
Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie's
radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of British
science that the human race without exception had lived and died in a
world of illusion until the last year of the century. The date was
convenient, and convenience was truth.
The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it,
and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no
one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation
obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against
which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being
merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last. He could
not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had
been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of
man by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the
perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the
perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal
to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and
the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the
principles of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into principles
of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the
despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. The physicists had
a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that we win is a
battle--lost in advance--with the irreversible phenomena in the
background of nature."
All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw
his education complete; and was sorry he ever began it. As a matter of
taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century education when God
was a father and nature a mother, and all was for the best in a
scientific universe. He repudiated all share in the world as it was to
be, and yet he could not detect the point where his responsibility
began or ended.
As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its
conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied all its
notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true because he made it, and he
loved it for the same reason. He sacrificed millions of lives to
acquire his unity, but he achieved it, and justly thought it a work of
art. The woman especially did great things, creating her deities on a
higher level than the male, and, in the end, compelling the man to
accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in his
Universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there, and sacrificed
herself without limit to make it habitable, when man permitted it, as
sometimes happened for brief intervals of war and famine; but she could
not provide protection against forces of nature. She did not think of
her universe as a raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge
of a supersensual chaos; she conceived herself and her family as the
centre and flower of an ordered universe which she knew to be unity
because she had made it after the image of her own fecundity; and this
creation of hers was surrounded by beauties and perfections which she
knew to be real because she herself had imagined them.
Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and celebrated
her triumph, and the greatest of them sang it in the noblest of his
verses:--
"Alma Venus, coeli subter labentia signa
Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferenteis
Concelebras ...... .
Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas,
Nec sine te quidquam dias in luminis oras
Exoritur, neque fit laetum neque amabile quidquam;
Te sociam studeo!"
Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their
own invention, and could no more have done it of their own accord than
the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the oyster might
perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced into its aperture,
it could only perish in face of the cyclonic hurricane or the volcanic
upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual chaos killed her.
Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on
the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt himself in
no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it his duty always to
speak with respect of everything that had ever been thought
respectable--except an occasional statesman; but he had submitted to
force all his life, and he meant to accept it for the future as for the
past. All his efforts had been turned only to the search for its
channel. He never invented his facts; they were furnished him by the
only authorities he could find. As for himself, according to Helmholz,
Ernst Mach, and Arthur Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious
ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite
lines of rotation or vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at
Chartres or of M. Poincare in an attic at Paris, a centre of
supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A solitary man
of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris
apartment, need fret himself little about a few illusions more or less.
He should have learned his lesson fifty years earlier; the times had
long passed when a student could stop before chaos or order; he had no
choice but to march with his world.
Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human mind
has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which
caged it; how--appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown
and unimaginable void; passing half its known life in the mental chaos
of sleep; victim even when awake, to its own ill-adjustment, to
disease, to age, to external suggestion, to nature's compulsion;
doubting its sensations, and, in the last resort, trusting only to
instruments and averages--after sixty or seventy years of growing
astonishment, the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the
void of death. That it should profess itself pleased by this
performance was all that the highest rules of good breeding could ask;
but that it should actually be satisfied would prove that it existed
only as idiocy.
Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself,
for even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it
had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to interpret
actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite
series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infinite
motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment into the
unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back within its
senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it,
until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on
it, which required new mental powers to control. If this view was
correct, the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must
merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it.
CHAPTER XXXII
VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
PARIS after midsummer is a place where only the industrious poor
remain, unless they can get away; but Adams knew no spot where history
would be better off, and the calm of the Champs Elysees was so deep
that when Mr. de Witte was promoted to a powerless dignity, no one
whispered that the promotion was disgrace, while one might have
supposed, from the silence, that the Viceroy Alexeieff had reoccupied
Manchuria as a fulfilment of treaty-obligation. For once, the
conspiracy of silence became crime. Never had so modern and so vital a
riddle been put before Western society, but society shut its eyes.
Manchuria knew every step into war; Japan had completed every
preparation; Alexeieff had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur,
mounting his siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the
expected attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war
conditions; but Europe knew nothing. The banks would allow no
disturbance; the press said not a word, and even the embassies were
silent. Every anarchist in Europe buzzed excitement and began to
collect in groups, but the Hotel Ritz was calm, and the Grand Dukes who
swarmed there professed to know directly from the Winter Palace that
there would be no war.
As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed
statesman, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could see
that the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of experience,
he could not understand how the comedy could be so well acted. Even as
late as November, diplomats were gravely asking every passer-by for his
opinion, and avowed none of their own except what was directly
authorized at St. Petersburg. He could make nothing of it. He found
himself in face of his new problem--the workings of Russian
inertia--and he could conceive no way of forming an opinion how much
was real and how much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace
himself. At times he doubted whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew,
but old diplomatic training forbade him to admit such innocence.
This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris. On
January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of
atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his country
think as a world-power. No doubt, Japanese diplomacy had much to do
with this alertness, but the immense superiority of Japanese diplomacy
should have been more evident in Europe than in America, and in any
case, could not account for the total disappearance of Russian
diplomacy. A government by inertia greatly disconcerted study. One was
led to suspect that Cassini never heard from his Government, and that
Lamsdorf knew nothing of his own department; yet no such suspicion
could be admitted. Cassini resorted to transparent blague: "Japan
seemed infatuated even to the point of war! But what can the Japanese
do? As usual, sit on their heels and pray to Buddha!" One of the oldest
and most accomplished diplomatists in the service could never show his
hand so empty as this if he held a card to play; but he never betrayed
stronger resource behind. "If any Japanese succeed in entering
Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive." The inertia of
Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of diplomatists, deeply
interested a student of race-inertia, whose mind had lost itself in the
attempt to invent scales of force.
The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of
the White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the
President. Reticence had no place there. Every one in America saw that,
whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the decisive struggles in
American history was pending, and any pretence of secrecy or
indifference was absurd. Interest was acute, and curiosity intense, for
no one knew what the Russian Government meant or wanted, while war had
become a question of days. To an impartial student who gravely doubted
whether the Czar himself acted as a conscious force or an inert weight,
the straight-forward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a
standard of measure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged to
take the place of his brother Brooks at the Diplomatic Reception
immediately after his return home, and the part of proxy included his
supping at the President's table, with Secretary Root on one side, the
President opposite, and Miss Chamberlain between them. Naturally the
President talked and the guests listened; which seemed, to one who had