The Education of Henry Adams
physical energy of creation which had built up these World's Fairs of
thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St. Louis pale.
"Both were faiths and both are gone," said Matthew Arnold of
the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was to
ask where they had gone. The Virgin had not even altogether gone; her
fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had pursued her too
long, too far, and into too many manifestations of her power, to admit
that she had any equivalent either of quantity or kind, in the actual
world, but he could still less admit her annihilation as energy.
So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had
found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers.
Her own age had no time-measure. For years past, incited by John La
Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the study of her glass
at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the automobile had one vitesse more
useful than another, it was that of a century a minute; that of passing
from one century to another without break. The centuries dropped like
autumn leaves in one's road, and one was not fined for running over
them too fast. When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught
on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin's glass
opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in
sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded France,
broke into Shelley's light dissolved in star-showers thrown, which had
left every remote village strewn with fragments that flashed like
jewels, and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness.
One dared not pass a parish church in Champagne or Touraine without
stopping to look for its window of fragments, where one's glass
discovered the Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a
fragmentary donkey, with a Cupid playing into its long ears from the
balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemish
leibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all invoked in
prayer by remnants of the donors and their children that might have
been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors as fresh and living as
the day they were burned in, and with feeling that still consoled the
faithful for the paradise they had paid for and lost. France abounds in
sixteenth-century glass. Paris alone contains acres of it, and the
neighborhood within fifty miles contains scores of churches where the
student may still imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling
before the Virgin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith,
crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical sins,
weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education, and still
desperately hoping to understand.
He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century
had a value of its own, as though the ONE had become several, and Unity
had counted more than Three, though the Multiple still showed modest
numbers. The glass had gone back to the Roman Empire and forward to the
American continent; it betrayed sympathy with Montaigne and
Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still supreme. At Beauvais in the
Church of St. Stephen was a superb tree of Jesse, famous as the work of
Engrand le Prince, about 1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the
fourteen ancestors of the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the
Kings of France, among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly
more edifying than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of
divine purity. Compared with the still more famous Tree of Jesse at
Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must one declare that
Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction? Complexity,
Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it might suggest, but what
step towards perfection?
One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was
wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate
conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelligent
seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two men
looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window. Approaching, he read that
M. de Plehve had been assassinated at St. Petersburg. The mad mixture
of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodrome and the Renaissance,
drove him for refuge into the fascinating Church of St. Pantaleon near
by. Martyrs, murderers, Caesars, saints and assassins--half in glass
and half in telegram; chaos of time, place, morals, forces and
motive--gave him vertigo. Had one sat all one's life on the steps of
Ara Coeli for this? Was assassination forever to be the last word of
Progress? No one in the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself
felt none; the charming Church with its delightful windows, in its
exquisite absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of
celestial peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of
explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist had come to his
own, but which was he--the murderer or the murdered?
The Virgin herself never looked so winning--so One--as in
this scandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she existed,
if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she
was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history. The
effort for Unity could not be a partial success; even alternating Unity
resolved itself into meaningless motion at last. To the tired student,
the idea that he must give it up seemed sheer senility. As long as he
could whisper, he would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet
his creator with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing
except that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle
might for convenience be taken as equal to something else. Every man
with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has
had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula
of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There,
whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made,
could be but verified.
The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old
formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the
object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth.
One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without
breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit
which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star
Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams. As term of a
nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certain
definite historical fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem
if he were given the right to state it in his own terms.
Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of
the centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down as
though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own needs the
values of a Dynamic Theory of History.
CHAPTER XXXIII
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging the
question: it defines Progress as the development and economy of Forces.
Further, it defines force as anything that does, or helps to do work.
Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a mathematical point, though
without dimensions or known existence.
Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he
captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force to
opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for granted
that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force attracts; the
feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he suffers education
or growth; he is the sum of the forces that attract him; his body and
his thought are alike their product; the movement of the forces
controls the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but the
motions which impinge on his senses, whose sum makes education.
For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature dance
like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them when it can;
but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory of force is sound.
The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular
skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in
different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no
power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even
of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire
taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water
probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of
mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into
his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens
or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of
study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed
his thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure.
Long before history began, his education was complete, for the
record could not have been started until he had been taught to record.
The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection
of his own unity, containing all forces except himself. Either
separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to
act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged the surface foliage of
a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests did,
to these attractions. Susceptibility to the highest forces is the
highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their
mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and still makes,
grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random
from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the
whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day,
his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer
give to force a name.
Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt
his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a
sling, to widen his range of power, as he sought fetish or a planet in
the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he
could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have
possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object
to teach him its use, or want of use, and the process was slow. He may
have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for Nature to
tell him her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has
taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force were
capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically selecting types
of race or sources of variation. The individual that responded or
reacted to lines of new force then was possibly the same individual
that reacts on it now, and his conception of the unity seems never to
have changed in spite of the increasing diversity of forces; but the
theory of variation is an affair of other science than history, and
matters nothing to dynamics. The individual or the race would be
educated on the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur
Balfour, had not essentially varied down to the year 1900.
To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word
which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether in
detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man symbolized it
and pursued it, both in himself, and in the infinite, as philosophy and