Chapter XXIV. Indian Summer (1898-1899)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life to
one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap in
peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had reason to
be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no such sense of
power and momentum, and had seen no such number of personal friends
wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for much in one's
contentment, but the sense of winning one's game counts for more; and
in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly interesting to the last
survivor of the Legation of 1861. He thought himself perhaps the only
person living who could get full enjoyment of the drama. He carried
every scene of it, in a century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite
alive in his mind -- all the interminable disputes of his
disputatious ancestors as far back as the year 1750 -- as well as his
own insignificance in the Civil War, every step in which had the
object of bringing England into an American system. For this they had
written libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on
war, losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle and
patient Puritan nature of their descendants, until even their private
secretaries at times used language almost intemperate; and suddenly,
by pure chance, the blessing fell on Hay. After two hundred years of
stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument and no violence
affected, the people of England learned their lesson just at the
moment when Hay would otherwise have faced a flood of the old
anxieties. Hay himself scarcely knew how grateful he should be, for
to him the change came almost of course. He saw only the necessary
stages that had led to it, and to him they seemed natural; but to
Adams, still living in the atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell,
the sudden appearance of Germany as the grizzly terror which, in
twenty years effected what Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain
-- frightened England into America's arms -- seemed as melodramatic
as any plot of Napoleon the Great. He could feel only the sense of
satisfaction at seeing the diplomatic triumph of all his family,
since the breed existed, at last realized under his own eyes for the
advantage of his oldest and closest ally.

This was history, not education, yet it taught something
exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For
the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose
working itself out in history. Probably no one else on this earthly
planet -- not even Hay -- could have come out on precisely such
extreme personal satisfaction, but as he sat at Hay's table,
listening to any member of the British Cabinet, for all were alike
now, discuss the Philippines as a question of balance of power in the
East, he could see that the family work of a hundred and fifty years
fell at once into the grand perspective of true empire-building,
which Hay's work set off with artistic skill. The roughness of the
archaic foundations looked stronger and larger in scale for the
refinement and certainty of the arcade. In the long list of famous
American Ministers in London, none could have given the work quite
the completeness, the harmony, the perfect ease of Hay.

Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law
in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it, for
chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal property by
inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in the affairs
of man -- a property which no one else had right to dispute; and this
personal triumph left him a little cold towards the other diplomatic
results of the war. He knew that Porto Rico must be taken, but he
would have been glad to escape the Philippines. Apart from too
intimate an acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas,
he knew the West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the
American people might think or say about it, they would sooner or
later have to police those islands, not against Europe, but for
Europe, and America too. Education on the outskirts of civilized life
teaches not very much, but it taught this; and one felt no call to
shoulder the load of archipelagoes in the antipodes when one was
trying painfully to pluck up courage to face the labor of shouldering
archipelagoes at home. The country decided otherwise, and one
acquiesced readily enough since the matter concerned only the public
willingness to carry loads; in London, the balance of power in the
East came alone into discussion; and in every point of view one had
as much reason to be gratified with the result as though one had
shared in the danger, instead of being vigorously employed in looking
on from a great distance. After all, friends had done the work, if
not one's self, and he too serves a certain purpose who only stands
and cheers.

In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they made a
sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms rivalling those
of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many beautiful places
scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler or more genial than
Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the Saxons, its avenues, its
terraces, its deer-park, its large repose on the Kentish hillside,
and its broad outlook over whet was once the forest of Anderida.
Filled with a constant stream of guests, the house seemed to wait for
the chance to show its charms to the American, with whose activity
the whole world was resounding; and never since the battle of
Hastings could the little telegraph office of the Kentish village
have done such work. There, on a hot July 4, 1898, to an expectant
group under the shady trees, came the telegram announcing the
destruction of the Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen
Elizabeth in 1588; and there, later in the season, came the order
summoning Hay to the State Department.

Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as he.
No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries of
State, or how little strength he had in reserve against it. Even at
Surrenden he showed none too much endurance, and he would gladly have
found a valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on both sides was
earnest, but the decided voice of the conclave was that, though if he
were a mere office-seeker he might certainly decline promotion, if he
were a member of the Government he could not. No serious statesman
could accept a favor and refuse a service. Doubtless he might refuse,
but in that case he must resign. The amusement of making Presidents
has keen fascination for idle American hands, but these black arts
have the old drawback of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one
evokes, even though the service were perdition to body and soul. For
him, no doubt, the service, though hard, might bring some share of
profit, but for the friends who gave this unselfish decision, all
would prove loss. For one, Adams on that subject had become a little
daft. No one in his experience had ever passed unscathed through that
malarious marsh. In his fancy, office was poison; it killed -- body
and soul -- physically and socially. Office was more poisonous than
priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it held more power; but the
poison he complained of was not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal
Wolsey's belated penitence for that healthy stimulant, as he had
shared none of the fruits; his poison was that of the will -- the
distortion of sight -- the warping of mind -- the degradation of
tissue -- the coarsening of taste -- the narrowing of sympathy to the
emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed no office in order to wield
influence. For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting for him
to stoop to it; he enjoyed more than enough power without office; no
one of his position, wealth, and political experience, living at the
centre of politics in contact with the active party managers, could
escape influence. His only ambition was to escape annoyance, and no
one knew better than he that, at sixty years of age, sensitive to
physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality, vindictiveness,
or betrayal, he took office at cost of life.

Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made presence of
gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and
lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the lighter for
their humor, and his obedience to the President's order was the
gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark views,
too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, while Hay had
at least the honors of office, his friends would share only the
ennuis of it; but, as usual with Hay, nothing was gained by taking
such matters solemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left their
mark of military drill on every one who lived through it. He
shouldered his pack and started for home. Adams had no mind to lose
his friend without a struggle, though he had never known such sort of
struggle to avail. The chance was desperate, but he could not afford
to throw it away; so, as soon as the Surrenden establishment broke
up, on October 17, he prepared for return home, and on November 13,
none too gladly, found himself again gazing into La Fayette
Square.

He had made another false start and lost two years more of
education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics nor
society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do with Hay's
politics at home or abroad, and never affected agreement with his
views or his methods, nor did Hay care whether his friends agreed or
disagreed. They all united in trying to help each other to get along
the best way they could, and all they tried to save was the personal
relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten had he not been
helped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her
husband into the habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend
off for an hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay
afterwards, and a chat with any one who called.

For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits which
were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right to be
called pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued nothing, but
drifted as attraction offered itself. The short session broke up the
Washington circle, so that, on March 22, Adams was able to sail with
the Lodges for Europe and to pass April in Sicily and Rome.

With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had
left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of
1860, but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe
and violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its
study on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy, without a shade
of sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse
teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not mute, and the church of
Ara Coeli seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to
a centre, for every new journey led back to its steps -- Karnak,
Ephesus, Delphi, Mycencae, Constantinople, Syracuse -- all lying on
the road to the Capitol. What they had to bring by way of
intellectual riches could not yet be discerned, but they carried
camel-loads of moral; and New York sent most of all, for, in forty
years, America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of
1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same plane
with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read of
Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of
Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew the
story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with political
assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The climax of
empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla
were a President or McKinley a Consul.

Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
obvious -- in no way unpleasant -- truth; therefore one sat silent as
ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges
added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose
solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory -- or
sufficient -- ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and
better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St.
Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these
fresh cross-lights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to
the astonishing contrast between what he had taught then and what he
found himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years
afterwards -- between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that
of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the
wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts
of derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac
and Soc: --

HIC JACET HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR DOCTOR BARBARICUS
HENRICUS ADAMS ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE PRIMO EXPLICUIT SOCNAM
The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as satire
the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of Sac
and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a
shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point
of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph
Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the
clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one
had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School,
because one could see no other path to a profession.

The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its
own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved
the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris
with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life
had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered.
He passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with the last at
Surrenden; but the solitude did what the society did not -- it forced
and drove him into the study of his ignorance in silence. Here at
last he entered the practice of his final profession. Hunted by
ennui, he could no longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he
began a methodical survey -- a triangulation -- of the twelfth
century. The pursuit had a singular French charm which France had
long lost -- a calmness, lucidity, simplicity of expression, vigor of
action, complexity of local color, that made Paris flat. In the long
summer days one found a sort of saturated green pleasure in the
forests, and gray infinity of rest in the little twelfth-century
churches that lined them, as unassuming as their own mosses, and as
sure of their purpose as their round arches; but churches were many
and summer was short, so that he was at last driven back to the quays
and photographs. For weeks he lived in silence.

His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new value.
Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since 1850 John
La Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat
at his feet since 1872, the question how much he owed to La Farge
could be answered only by admitting that he had no standard to
measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge alone owned a mind complex
enough to contrast against the commonplaces of American uniformity,
and in the process had vastly perplexed most Americans who came in
contact with it. The American mind -- the Bostonian as well as the
Southern or Western -- likes to walk straight up to its object, and
assert or deny something that it takes for a fact; it has a
conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional
conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly
asserting its unconventionality. The most disconcerting trait of John
La Farge was his reversal of the process. His approach was quiet and
indirect; he moved round an object, and never separated it from its
surroundings; he prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and
convention; he was never abrupt and abhorred dispute. His manners and
attitude towards the universe were the same, whether tossing in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean sketching the trade-wind from a
whale-boat in the blast of sea-sickness, or drinking the cha-no-yu in
the formal rites of Japan, or sipping his cocoanut cup of kava in the
ceremonial of Samoan chiefs, or reflecting under the sacred bo-tree
at Anaradjpura.

One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but always
there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it flowed, for
even a contradiction was to him only a shade of difference, a
complementary color, about which no intelligent artist would dispute.
Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams, you reason too much!" was
one of his standing reproaches even in the mild discussion of rice
and mangoes in the warm night of Tahiti dinners. He should have
blamed Adams for being born in Boston. The mind resorts to reason for
want of training, and Adams had never met a perfectly trained
mind.

To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone -- a shade
-- a nuance -- and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of
course all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their
art, but few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is
excessive between their art and their talk. One evening Humphreys
Johnston, who was devoted to La Farge, asked him to meet Whistler at
dinner. La Farge was ill -- more ill than usual even for him -- but
he admired and liked Whistler, and insisted on going. By chance,
Adams was so placed as to overhear the conversation of both, and had
no choice but to hear that of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At
that moment the Boer War was raging, and, as every one knows, on that
subject Whistler raged worse than the Boers. For two hours he
declaimed against England -- witty, declamatory, extravagant, bitter,
amusing, and noisy; but in substance what he said was not merely
commonplace -- it was true! That is to say, his hearers, including
Adams and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed with it all, and
mostly as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent, and this
difference of expression was a difference of art. Whistler in his art
carried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point reached by
La Farge, or even attempted; but in talk he showed, above or below
his color-instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real
eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed.

This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his painting,
La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value of La
Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams was too
ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible more
ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to the twelfth
century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt at home, but
felt a sort of ownership. No other American had a right there, unless
he too were a member of the Church and worked in glass. Adams himself
was an interloper, but long habit led La Farge to resign himself to
Adams as one who meant well, though deplorably Bostonian; while
Adams, though near sixty years old before he knew anything either of
glass or of Chartres, asked no better than to learn, and only La
Farge could help him, for he knew enough at least to see that La
Farge alone could use glass like a thirteenth-century artist. In
Europe the art had been dead for centuries, and modern glass was
pitiable. Even La Farge felt the early glass rather as a document
than as a historical emotion, and in hundreds of windows at Chartres
and Bourges and Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant
to hold their own against a color-scheme so strong as his. In
conversation La Farge's mind was opaline with infinite shades and
refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest
gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it
asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never
before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a
step backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health became more
and more alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back to New
York, January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to Washington
to find out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could be hoped, for
Hay's troubles had begun, and were quite as great as he had foreseen.
Adams saw as little encouragement as Hay himself did, though he dared
not say so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness in
supporting him, and the loyalty of his party friends; but all this
worry on Hay's account fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War
did on his own. Here was a problem in his political education that
passed all experience since the Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to
his astonishment, very few Americans seemed to share his point of
view; their hostility to England seemed mere temper; but to Adams the
war became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from
childhood, even in England, that his forbears and their associates in
1776 had settled, once for all, the liberties of the British free
colonies, and he very strongly objected to being thrown on the
defensive again, and forced to sit down, a hundred and fifty years
after John Adams had begun the task, to prove, by appeal to law and
fact, that George Washington was not a felon, whatever might be the
case with George III. For reasons still more personal, he declined
peremptorily to entertain question of the felony of John Adams. He
felt obliged to go even further, and avow the opinion that if at any
time England should take towards Canada the position she took towards
her Boer colonies, the United States would be bound, by their record,
to interpose, and to insist on the application of the principles of
1776. To him the attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues
seemed exceedingly un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.

Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue,
and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could
never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical
objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms.
Hay's chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck should
turn, and to him the only object was time; but as political education
the point seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shutting his eyes or
denying an evident fact. Practical politics consists in ignoring
facts, but education and politics are two different and often
contradictory things. In this case, the contradiction seemed
crude.

With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram
Hewitt, Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden -- men who played the
game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better
than the professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than
those of the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap
drudgery of the work. In return, the professionals felt no great love
for them, and set them aside when they could. Only their control of
money made them inevitable, and even this did not always carry their
points. The story of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this
statesman series, and that of Hay another. President Cleveland set
aside the one; President Harrison set aside the other. "There is no
politics in it," was his comment on Hay's appointment to office. Hay
held a different opinion and turned to McKinley whose judgment of men
was finer than common in Presidents. Mr. McKinley brought to the
problem of American government a solution which lay very far outside
of Henry Adams's education, but which seemed to be at least practical
and American. He undertook to pool interests in a general trust into
which every interest should be taken, more or less at its own
valuation, and whose mass should, under his management, create
efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results. How much they cost
was another matter; if the public is ever driven to its last
resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the result will probably
cost more.

Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of
whom was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and his
task hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by simply
paying their price; but abroad whatever helped on one side, hurt him
on another. Hay thought England must be brought first into the
combine; but at that time Germany, Russia, and France were all
combining against England, and the Boer War helped them. For the
moment Hay had no ally, abroad or at home, except Pauncefote, and
Adams always maintained that Pauncefote alone pulled him through.

Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more unmanageable,
even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was less the fault of
the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of peace, in any normal
state of things," said Hay, "ought to be ratified with unanimity in
twenty-four hours. They wasted six weeks in wrangling over this one,
and ratified it with one vote to spare. We have five or six matters
now demanding settlement. I can settle them all, honorably and
advantageously to our own side; and I am assured by leading men in
the Senate that not one of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass
the Senate. I should have a majority in every case, but a malcontent
third would certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape
has the original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution
of our politics. You must understand, it is not merely my solution
the Senate will reject. They will reject, for instance, any treaty,
whatever, on any subject, with England. I doubt if they would accept
any treaty of consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrant
third would be differently composed, but it would be on hand. So that
the real duties of a Secretary of State seem to be three: to fight
claims upon us by other States; to press more or less fraudulent
claims of our own citizens upon other countries; to find offices for
the friends of Senators when there are none. Is it worth while -- for
me -- to keep up this useless labor?"

To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it in a
dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred years
before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be humorous. The
intrigue was too open to be interesting. The interference of the
German and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with the press
and the Senate was innocently undisguised. The charming Russian
Minister, Count Cassini, the ideal of diplomatic manners and
training, let few days pass without appealing through the press to
the public against the government. The German Minister, Von Holleben,
more cautiously did the same thing, and of course every whisper of
theirs was brought instantly to the Department. These three forces,
acting with the regular opposition and the natural obstructionists,
could always stop action in the Senate. The fathers had intended to
neutralize the energy of government and had succeeded, but their
machine was never meant to do the work of a twenty-million
horse-power society in the twentieth century, where much work needed
to be quickly and efficiently done. The only defence of the system
was that, as Government did nothing well, it had best do nothing; but
the Government, in truth, did perfectly well all it was given to do;
and even if the charge were true, it applied equally to human society
altogether, if one chose to treat mankind from that point of view. As
a matter of mechanics, so much work must be done; bad machinery
merely added to friction.

Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling
it to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all: he laughed
and accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would have gladly
lived his entire life over again exactly as it happened. In the whole
New York school, one met a similar dash of humor and cynicism more or
less pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even the gayest of tempers
succumbs at last to constant friction The old friend was rapidly
fading. The habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless
gaiety, the casual humor, the equality of indifference, were sinking
into the routine of office; the mind lingered in the Department; the
thought failed to react; the wit and humor shrank within the blank
walls of politics, and the irritations multiplied. To a head of
bureau, the result seemed ennobling.

Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that these
political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and
twentieth centuries should be correlated in some relation of movement
that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least
that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not
enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s =
gt^2/2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and
moon, an obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square
could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its
attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value,
even infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A
historical formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar
universe weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like this
was one in which he could look for no help from anybody -- he could
look only for derision at best.

All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as
futile and almost immoral -- certainly hostile to sound historical
system. Adams tried it only because of its hostility to all that he
had taught for history, since he started afresh from the new point
that, whatever was right, all he had ever taught was wrong. He had
pursued ignorance thus far with success, and had swept his mind clear
of knowledge. In beginning again, from the starting-point of Sir
Isaac Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in
Washington cared to overstep the school conventions, and the most
distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician
to treat such a scheme seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged
by his rank in science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and
Adams never enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the
most distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more
accessible, to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning
whenever he wanted an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance.
Langley listened with outward patience to his disputatious
questionings; but he too nourished a scientific passion for doubt,
and sentimental attachment for its avowal. He had the physicist's
heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of
intense perception. Like so many other great observers, Langley was
not a mathematician, and like most physicists, he believed in
physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which
consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble
problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past them
in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though
recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectability. He
generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to affirm; and early
put into Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern Science," a volume by
Judge Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen years by the schools
with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably meets every
revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.

Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be as
ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant
nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough, or
was too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never to direction or
progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it
could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything
must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure;
and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more, and found himself on
May 12 settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero.