Chapter XXVI. Twilight (1901)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted
meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the Paris
Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and
Besnard, the world that thought itself serious, and showed other
infallible marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird
doings at Peking and elsewhere such as startled even itself. Of all
branches of education, the science of gauging people and events by
their relative importance defies study most insolently. For three or
four generations, society has united in withering with contempt and
opprobrium the shameless futility of Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du
Barry; yet, if one bid at an auction for some object that had been
approved by the taste of either lady, one quickly found that it were
better to buy half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas,
or all the philosophy and science of their time, than to bid for a
cane-bottomed chair that either of these two ladies had adorned. The
same thing might be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire; while,
as every one knows, the money-value of any hand-stroke of Watteau or
Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out of all proportion to the
importance of the men. Society seemed to delight in talking with
solemn conviction about serious values, and in paying fantastic
prices for nothing but the most futile. The drama acted at Peking, in
the summer of 1900, was, in the eyes of a student, the most serious
that could be offered for his study, since it brought him suddenly to
the inevitable struggle for the control of China, which, in his view,
must decide the control of the world; yet, as a money-value, the fall
of China was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to
Chinese porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than
universal war.

The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on
future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more
about it than though he were the best-informed statesman in Europe.
Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations were massacred,
and that John Hay, who alone championed China's "administrative
entity," would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on, in
impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China, and shut up
America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten, in Europe, accepted this
result in advance, seeing no way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and
laughed at Hay for his helplessness.

When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on, as
incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on that
branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing so
meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On returning to
Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the world as
astonished as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a moment,
indeed, the world had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put Europe aside
and set the Washington Government at the head of civilization so
quietly that civilization submitted, by mere instinct of docility, to
receive and obey his orders; but, after the first shock of silence,
society felt the force of the stroke through its fineness, and burst
into almost tumultuous applause. Instantly the diplomacy of the
nineteenth century, with all its painful scuffles and struggles, was
forgotten, and the American blushed to be told of his submissions in
the past. History broke in halves.

Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of his
own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh
life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic, and
depression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles nested at
home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's diplomatic court
had become the largest in the world, and the diplomatic relations
required far more work than ever before, while the staff of the
Department was little more efficient, and the friction in the Senate
had become coagulated. Hay took to studying the "Diary" of John
Quincy Adams eighty years before, and calculated that the resistance
had increased about ten times, as measured by waste of days and
increase of effort, although Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought
himself very hardly treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing
him, and proved it, for the effort of the afternoon walk became
sometimes painful.

For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly
team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole load
and turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and Holleben
helped the Senate to make what trouble they could, without serious
offence, and the Irish, after the genial Celtic nature, obstructed
even themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks to their sympathetic
qualities, never made lasting enmities; but the Germans seemed in a
fair way to rouse ill-will and even ugly temper in the spirit of
politics, which was by no means a part of Hay's plans. He had as much
as he could do to overcome domestic friction, and felt no wish to
alienate foreign powers. Yet so much could be said in favor of the
foreigners that they commonly knew why they made trouble, and were
steady to a motive. Cassini had for years pursued, in Peking as in
Washington, a policy of his own, never disguised, and as little in
harmony with his chief as with Hay; he made his opposition on fixed
lines for notorious objects; but Senators could seldom give a reason
for obstruction. In every hundred men, a certain number obstruct by
instinct, and try to invent reasons to explain it afterwards. The
Senate was no worse than the board of a university; but incorporators
as a rule have not made this class of men dictators on purpose to
prevent action. In the Senate, a single vote commonly stopped
legislation, or, in committee, stifled discussion.

Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations,
and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant
obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience and bargaining
in executive patronage, if indeed it could be overcome at all. The
price actually paid was not very great except in the physical
exhaustion of Hay and Pauncefote, Root and McKinley. No serious
bargaining of equivalents could be attempted; Senators would not
sacrifice five dollars in their own States to gain five hundred
thousand in another; but whenever a foreign country was willing to
surrender an advantage without an equivalent, Hay had a chance to
offer the Senate a treaty. In all such cases the price paid for the
treaty was paid wholly to the Senate, and amounted to nothing very
serious except in waste of time and wear of strength. "Life is so gay
and horrid!" laughed Hay; "the Major will have promised all the
consulates in the service; the Senators will all come to me and
refuse to believe me dis-consulate; I shall see all my treaties
slaughtered, one by one, by the thirty-four per cent of kickers and
strikers; the only mitigation I can foresee is being sick a good part
of the time; I am nearing my grand climacteric, and the great culbute
is approaching."

He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight -- the solitary
picturesque and tragic element in politics -- incidentally requiring
character-studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and
Webster and Sumner, with Sir Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and
stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place
of Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack
Cades, Falstaffs, and Malvolios -- endless varieties of human nature
nowhere else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they
killed, or because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity.
"Life is so gay and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more
and more rarely, but what he felt most was the enormous complexity
and friction of the vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly
complained that it had made him a bore -- of all things the most
senatorial, and to him the most obnoxious. The old friend was lost,
and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by the complexities
and multiplicities of his new world.

To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great
value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the practical
interest and the practical man were such as looked forward to the
next election, or perhaps, in corporations, five or ten years.
Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could be named who were known to
have looked a dozen years ahead; while any historian who means to
keep his alignment with past and future must cover a horizon of two
generations at least. If he seeks to align himself with the future,
he must assume a condition of some sort for a world fifty years
beyond his own. Every historian -- sometimes unconsciously, but
always inevitably -- must have put to himself the question: How long
could such-or-such an outworn system last? He can never give himself
less than one generation to show the full effects of a changed
condition. His object is to triangulate from the widest possible base
to the furthest point he thinks he can see, which is always far
beyond the curvature of the horizon.

To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right --
if the question of right or wrong enters at all into the matter --
the historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in his own
profession few companions offer help, and his walk soon becomes
solitary, leading further and further into a wilderness where
twilight is short and the shadows are dense. Already Hay literally
staggered in his tracks for weariness. More worn than he, Clarence
King dropped. One day in the spring he stopped an hour in Washington
to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling how his doctors had
condemned him to Arizona for his lungs. All three friends knew that
they were nearing the end, and that if it were not the one it would
be the other; but the affectation of readiness for death is a stage
role, and stoicism is a stupid resource, though the only one. Non
doles, Paete! One is ashamed of it even in the acting.

The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that a
share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared
from their lives; but Hay had still his family and ambition, while
Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, his eyes
rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening
prairie of education, without a motive, big or small, except
curiosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point that would
give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light
at the end of the passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and
he were again to fall into King's arms at the door of the last and
only log cabin left in life. Time had become terribly short, and the
sense of knowing so little when others knew so much, crushed out
hope.

He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest toy
he knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played since
babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk with
magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by compass. Then he read
all the books he could find, and tried in vain to makes his lines of
force agree with theirs. The books confounded him. He could not
credit his own understanding. Here was literally the most concrete
fact in nature, next to gravitation which it defied; a force which
must have radiated lines of energy without stop, since time began, if
not longer, and which might probably go on radiating after the sun
should fall into the earth, since no one knew why -- or how -- or
what it radiated -- or even whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the
earliest known of all natural forces after the solar energies, it
seemed to have suggested no idea to any one until some mariner
bethought himself that it might serve for a pointer. Another thousand
years passed when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a
pump, supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity,
still without knowing how it worked or what it was. For a historian,
the story of Faraday's experiments and the invention of the dynamo
passed belief; it revealed a condition of human ignorance and
helplessness before the commonest forces, such as his mind refused to
credit. He could not conceive but that some one, somewhere, could
tell him all about the magnet, if one could but find the book --
although he had been forced to admit the same helplessness in the
face of gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors; and he could imagine
no reason why society should treat radium as revolutionary in science
when every infant, for ages past, had seen the magnet doing what
radium did; for surely the kind of radiation mattered nothing
compared with the energy that radiated and the matter supplied for
radiation. He dared not venture into the complexities of chemistry,
or microbes, so long as this child's toy offered complexities that
befogged his mind beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless
variety of pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He
wanted to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a magnet.
He figured the human mind itself as another radiating matter through
which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.

In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the
forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new
relation staggered his new education by its evidence of growing
complexity, and multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He
could not escape it; politics or science, the lesson was the same,
and at every step it blocked his path whichever way he turned. He
found it in politics; he ran against it in science; he struck it in
everyday life, as though he were still Adam in the Garden of Eden
between God who was unity, and Satan who was complexity, with no
means of deciding which was truth. The problem was the same for
McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate as for Satan. Hay was going
to wreck on it, like King and Adams.

All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won. The National Government and the national unity had
overcome every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were
triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and the
momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction. One had
in vain bowed one's neck to railways, banks, corporations, trusts,
and even to the popular will as far as one could understand it -- or
even further; the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was
increasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason. He had
surrendered all his favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms
of criticism -- except for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a
tonic or stimulant necessary to healthy life; he had accepted
uniformity and Pteraspis and ice age and tramways and telephones; and
now -- just when he was ready to hang the crowning garland on the
brow of a completed education -- science itself warned him to begin
it again from the beginning.

Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a
full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a
confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell,
and that it might be worth looking at if only to steady his vision.
He read it again, and thought it better than he could do at
sixty-three; but elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts
grown larger, and became curious to know what had been said about
them since 1870. The Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes,
and reading for steady months; while, the longer he read, the more he
wondered, pondered, doubted what his delightful old friend Sir
Charles Lyell would have said about it.

Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and
the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve
themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one.
Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted towards unity or
multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would depend on the age of
the man who drifted.

Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see what
had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the
Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when
geological life was young; as though they had all remained together
in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat "how
charming is divine philosophy!" He felt almost aggrieved to find
Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the
ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower
Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi
gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote,
in the dawn of known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less,
of limestone were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they
buried the uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own
uniformity. Not for all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a
discreet historian dare to hazard even in secret an opinion about the
value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes under Uniform
Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his
neighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not select
-- evolution finished before it began -- minute changes that refused
to change anything during the whole geological record - survival of
the highest order in a fauna which had no origin -- uniformity under
conditions which had disturbed everything else in creation -- to an
honest-meaning though ignorant student who needed to prove Natural
Selection and not assume it, such sequence brought no peace. He
wished to be shown that changes in form caused evolution in force;
that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural selection and
minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted itself into
thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove -- to him -- that it had
selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were
right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised
in intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a
huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid
troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that
Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what
sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed
orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on
its own lines quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up
again. A little more, and he would be driven back on the old
independence of species.

What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to
them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought
and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the
matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door
of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and
uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the
old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing,
subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths
that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved. The active
geologists had mostly become specialists dealing with complexities
far too technical for an amateur, but the old formulas still seemed
to serve for beginners, as they had served when new.

So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of Lyell
and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into half-a-dozen
intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern hemisphere
alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the glaciation
of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a horizon
more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank, though
Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work, showing
that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and
sank. Lyell's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had
taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown young,
nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge
overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused
even to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing
that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.

Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than
the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no way
concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or
discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind
concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern
in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In
thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and
degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites
without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and
had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of
Lord Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for
their experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly
to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of
Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe;
they had protested with mild conviction that they could not state the
geological record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under
their breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that
lay on the tips of their tongues.

Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other
times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
electrolytic -- who knew what? -- defying science, if not denying
known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and
invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians
have got into far too much trouble by following schools of theology
in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis, that they should
willingly repeat the process in science. For human purposes a point
must always be soon reached where larger synthesis is suicide.

Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the
change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any
student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his
thought, should delight in turning about and trying the opposite
motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and
irritated statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms,
cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every
schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never saved him from
whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay and Adams could
neither of them escape floundering through the corridors of chaos
that opened as they passed to the end; but they could at least float
with the stream if they only knew which way the current ran. Adams
would have liked to begin afresh with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in
the waters of Braintree, side by side with Adamses and Quincys and
Harvard College, all unchanged and unchangeable since archaic time;
but what purpose would it serve? A seeker of truth -- or illusion --
would be none the less restless, though a shark!