The Education of Henry Adams
just escaped from the European conspiracy of silence, like drawing a
free breath after stifling. Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an
amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any
other man of great importance in the world, except the Kaiser Wilhelm
and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at table; and this
evening he spared none. With the usual abuse of the quos ego, common to
vigorous statesmen, he said all that he thought about Russians and
Japanese, as well as about Boers and British, without restraint, in
full hearing of twenty people, to the entire satisfaction of his
listener; and concluded by declaring that war was imminent; that it
ought to be stopped; that it could be stopped: "I could do it myself; I
could stop it to-morrow!" and he went on to explain his reasons for
restraint.
That he was right, and that, within another generation, his
successor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow of
doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been folly when
he last supped at the White House in the dynasty of President Hayes;
but the listener cared less for the assertion of power, than for the
vigor of view. The truth was evident enough, ordinary, even commonplace
if one liked, but it was not a truth of inertia, nor was the method to
be mistaken for inert.
Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a
force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as methodically--as
mathematically--as a demonstration of Euclid, and Adams thought that as
against any but Russians it would have lost its opening. Each day
counted as a measure of relative energy on the historical scale, and
the whole story made a Grammar of new Science quite as instructive as
that of Pearson.
The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new
equilibrium which would prove the problem in one sense or another, and
the war had no personal value for Adams except that it gave Hay his
last great triumph. He had carried on his long contest with Cassini so
skillfully that no one knew enough to understand the diplomatic
perfection of his work, which contained no error; but such success is
complete only when it is invisible, and his victory at last was victory
of judgment, not of act. He could do nothing, and the whole country
would have sprung on him had he tried. Japan and England saved his
"open door" and fought his battle. All that remained for him was to
make the peace, and Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in
hand, for Hay's sake as well as for that of Russia. He thought then
that it could be done in one campaign, for he knew that, in a military
sense, the fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and every one
felt that Hay would inevitably direct it; but the race was close, and
while the war grew every day in proportions, Hay's strength every day
declined.
St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted his
portrait, two steps essential to immortality which he bore with a
certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the President made
him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at the Exposition; and
Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for whatever use he could suppose
himself to serve. He professed the religion of World's Fairs, without
which he held education to be a blind impossibility; and obeyed Mrs.
Hay's bidding the more readily because it united his two educations in
one; but theory and practice were put to equally severe test at St.
Louis. Ten years had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and
he found everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through
Ohio and Indiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys
reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with
scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, formed the setting of every town.
Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the new American,
but this matter of discards concerned the measure of force little,
while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so much that Adams thought
the Secretary of State should have rushed to the platform at every
station to ask who were the people; for the American of the prime
seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee and the buffalo.
The subject grew quickly delicate. History told little about
these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their race-names, who
had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine and the Danube had
turned their floods into the Ohio. John Hay was as strange to the
Mississippi River as though he had not been bred on its shores, and the
city of St. Louis had turned its back on the noblest work of nature,
leaving it bankrupt between its own banks. The new American showed his
parentage proudly; he was the child of steam and the brother of the
dynamo, and already, within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed
humanities, brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into
approach to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing
no distinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American, like
the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of
the twelfth century was the servant of the Church, and the features
would follow the parentage.
The St. Louis Exposition was its first creation in the
twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One saw
here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history,
education, unity, or art, and with little capital--without even an
element of natural interest except the river which it studiously
ignored--but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk
from attempting. This new social conglomerate, with no tie but its
steam-power and not much of that, threw away thirty or forty million
dollars on a pageant as ephemeral as a stage flat. The world had never
witnessed so marvellous a phantasm by night Arabia's crimson sands had
never returned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long
lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands
of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous
depths; all in deep silence, profound solitude, listening for a voice
or a foot-fall or the plash of an oar, as though the Emir Mirza were
displaying the beauties of this City of Brass, which could show nothing
half so beautiful as this illumination, with its vast, white,
monumental solitude, bathed in the pure light of setting suns. One
enjoyed it with iniquitous rapture, not because of exhibits but rather
because of their want. Here was a paradox like the stellar universe
that fitted one's mental faults. Had there been no exhibits at all, and
no visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the more.
Here education found new forage. That the power was wasted, the
art indifferent, the economic failure complete, added just so much to
the interest. The chaos of education approached a dream. One asked
one's self whether this extravagance reflected the past or imaged the
future; whether it was a creation of the old American or a promise of
the new one. No prophet could be believed, but a pilgrim of power,
without constituency to flatter, might allow himself to hope. The
prospect from the Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see almost an
adequate motive for power; almost a scheme for progress. In another
half-century, the people of the central valleys should have hundreds of
millions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they could throw away
tens; and by that time they might know what they wanted. Possibly they
might even have learned how to reach it.
This was an optimist's hope, shared by few except pilgrims of
World's Fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude, for, east of the
Mississippi, the St. Louis Exposition met a deliberate conspiracy of
silence, discouraging, beyond measure, to an optimistic dream of future
strength in American expression. The party got back to Washington on
May 24, and before sailing for Europe, Adams went over, one warm
evening, to bid good-bye on the garden-porch of the White House. He
found himself the first person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the
Exposition for its beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last.
He left St. Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found
himself again in the town of Coutances, where the people of Normandy
had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which architects still
admired and tourists visited, for it was thought singularly expressive
of force as well as of grace in the Virgin. On this Sunday, the Norman
world was celebrating a pretty church-feast--the Fete Dieu--and the
streets were filled with altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and
foliage; the pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring
handiwork of nature; the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene
was graceful. The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition on Sunday,
or any other day, even to American senators who had shut the St. Louis
Exposition to her--or for her; and a historical tramp would gladly have
offered a candle, or even a candle-stick in her honor, if she would
have taught him her relation with the deity of the Senators. The power
of the Virgin had been plainly One, embracing all human activity; while
the power of the Senate, or its deity, seemed--might one say--to be
more or less ashamed of man and his work. The matter had no great
interest as far as it concerned the somewhat obscure mental processes
of Senators who could probably have given no clearer idea than priests
of the deity they supposed themselves to honor--if that was indeed
their purpose; but it interested a student of force, curious to measure
its manifestations. Apparently the Virgin--or her Son--had no longer
the force to build expositions that one cared to visit, but had the
force to close them. The force was still real, serious, and, at St.
Louis, had been anxiously measured in actual money-value.
That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate
Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an
automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form
of force which Adams most abominated. He had set aside the summer for
study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but as a motive power, which
had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached. The
automobile alone could unite them in any reasonable sequence, and
although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial
traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that
inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would
have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she
controlled the seeker of history. In his mind the problem offered
itself as to Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew
it, in his own case, to be a formula as precise as s = gt^2/2, if he
could but experimentally prove it. Of the attraction he needed no proof
on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more than
sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others than himself.
For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led the automobile
and its owner where she would, to her wonderful palaces and chateaux,
from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of
others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as
though she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever
dreamed. He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre
of his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could
dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the
formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to her
charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental and