Chapter XXVII. Teufelsdrockh (1901)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no
other spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side.
Even more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris taught in the
twentieth, with no other school approaching it for variety of
direction and energy of mind. Of the teaching in detail, a man who
knew only what accident had taught him in the nineteenth century,
could know next to nothing, since science had got quite beyond his
horizon, and mathematics had become the only necessary language of
thought; but one could play with the toys of childhood, including
Ming porcelain, salons of painting, operas and theatres, beaux-arts
and Gothic architecture, theology and anarchy, in any jumble of time;
or totter about with Joe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent
poetry, or studying "Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the
charm of youth and the Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young
wife. Paris remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself
though China fell. Scores of artists -- sculptors and painters, poets
and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs and
furniture -- hundreds of chemists, physicists, even philosophers,
philologists, physicians, and historians -- were at work, a thousand
times as actively as ever before, and the mass and originality of
their product would have swamped any previous age, as it very nearly
swamped its own; but the effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as
helpless before it as before the chaos of New York. His single
thought was to keep in front of the movement, and, if necessary, lead
it to chaos, but never fall behind. Only the young have time to
linger in the rear.

The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced
student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or
Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in the
morning in a beer- garden even after four hours of Mounet Sully at
the Theatre Francais. In those branches, education might be called
closed. Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything worth knowing to
a man who, holding open the door into the next world, regarded
himself as merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The
glance was more amusing than any he had known in his active life, but
it was more -- infinitely more -- chaotic and complex.

Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or
there-abouts, he had been repeating that he really must go to
Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him
come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager and
appreciative as ever, at the little old town of Rothenburg-on-the
Taube, and they went on to the Baireuth festival together.

Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would have
opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different
from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth
seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Brunhilde, perhaps
even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world, calm,
contemplative, and remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed,
and Wagner had become a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or
Bret Harte. The rococo element jarred. Even the Hudson and the
Susquehanna -- perhaps the Potomac itself -- had often risen to drown
out the gods of Walhalla, and one could hardly listen to the
"Gotterdammerung" in New York, among throngs of intense young
enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous excitement that toned down
to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as though the gods were Bavarian
composers. New York or Paris might be whatever one pleased -- venal,
sordid, vulgar -- but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its
decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art.
Perhaps they were; and at all events, Wagner was chiefly responsible
for them as artistic emotion. New York knew better than Baireuth what
Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris had more than once
included the rising of the Seine to drown out the Etoile or
Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts spells of
enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery in the
thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would surely
happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening at
Baireuth, or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with catastrophe
as though it were an old mistress -- faced it almost gaily as she had
done so often, for they were acquainted since Rome began to ravage
Europe; while New York met it with a glow of fascinated horror, like
an inevitable earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with
conviction that made nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased
to do under the accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular
virtue. Flattery had lost its charm, but the Fluch-motif went
home.

Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become a
habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy; though not
with socialism, which, to young men who nourished artistic emotions
under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed hopelessly bourgeois, and
lowest middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to
the wholly new and original party of Conservative Christian
Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the
"Gotterdammerung." Such a party saw no inspiration in Baireuth, where
landscape, history, and audience were -- relatively -- stodgy, and
where the only emotion was a musical dilettantism that the master had
abhorred.

Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had
supposed himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau Wagner
and the Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the Senator,
yearning for sterner study, pointed to a haven at Moscow. For years
Adams had taught American youth never to travel without a Senator who
was useful even in America at times, but indispensable in Russia
where, in 1901, anarchists, even though conservative and Christian,
were ill-seen.

This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian
anarchist, as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer rightly
understood. By the necessity of their philosophical descent, each
member of the fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty
task and inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no third member could be
so much as considered, since the great principle of contradiction
could be expressed only by opposites; and no agreement could be
conceived, because anarchy, by definition, must be chaos and
collision, as in the kinetic theory of a perfect gas. Doubtless this
law of contradiction was itself agreement, a restriction of personal
liberty inconsistent with freedom; but the "larger synthesis"
admitted a limited agreement provided it were strictly confined to
the end of larger contradiction. Thus the great end of all philosophy
-- the "larger synthesis" -- was attained, but the process was
arduous, and while Adams, as the older member, assumed to declare the
principle, Bay Lodge necessarily denied both the assumption and the
principle in order to assure its truth.

Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative
and Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the end; and,
to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to concentrate
energy; to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces; to
reduce friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly
because this was the mechanical law of the universe as science
explained it; but partly also in order to get done with the present
which artists and some others complained of; and finally -- and
chiefly -- because a rigorous philosophy required it, in order to
penetrate the beyond, and satisfy man's destiny by reaching the
largest synthesis in its ultimate contradiction.

Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this
scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but such
objection meant only that the critic should begin his education in
any infant school in order to learn that anarchy which should be
logical would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian
anarchist, the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas
of Russian mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely to
disguise their innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee Reclus were
ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a
bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of
anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither
of them had formed any other conception of the universe than what
they had inherited from the priestly class to which their minds
obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist, or
collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation; if
anarchists needed order, they must go back to the twelfth century
where their thought had enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The
conservative Christian anarchist could have no associate, no object,
no faith except the nature of nature itself; and his "larger
synthesis" had only the fault of being so supremely true that even
the highest obligation of duty could scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to
deny it in order to prove it. Only the self-evident truth that no
philosophy of order -- except the Church -- had ever satisfied the
philosopher reconciled the conservative Christian anarchist to prove
his own.

Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner or
Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men have
been mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such
refinements were Greek or German, and affected the practical American
but little. He admitted that, for the moment, the darkness was dense.
He could not affirm with confidence, even to himself, that his
"largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to be chaos, since he
would be equally obliged to deny the chaos. The poet groped blindly
for an emotion. The play of thought for thought's sake had mostly
ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power,
doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the
horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned
rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants
of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative
Christian anarchist saw light.

Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to Russia
in order to enlarge his "synthesis" -- and much he needed it! In
America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the faith was
national, racial, geographic. The true American had never seen such
supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades between social
anarchy and social order as to mark it for exclusively human and his
own. He never had known a complete union either in Church or State or
thought, and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave him
courage to meet any contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore
it. Exactly the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The
Czar's empire was a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more
interesting to history than all the complex variety of American
newspapers, schools, trusts, sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These
were Nature -- pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian
anarchist saw Nature -- active, vibrating, mostly unconscious, and
quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one caught
from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the Polish Jew
at the accidental railway station, in all his weird horror, to the
last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle and kissing
his ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St. Petersburg,
all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic. Russia had
nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that history knew;
she had been the oldest source of all civilization in Europe, and had
kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a
phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and
was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth
century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth. Studied in
the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia became
luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity as
though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out -- an
inert residuum -- with movement of pure inertia. From the car window
one seemed to float past undulations of nomad life -- herders
deserted by their leaders and herds -- wandering waves stopped in
their wanderings -- waiting for their winds or warriors to return and
lead them westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the
season, and had lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit
of permanence. They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out
of place, and could never have been normal. Their country acted as a
sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the
uniformity of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a
saint's day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The
student had no need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or
Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most
poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more
than enough: Kropotkin answered every purpose.

The Russian people could never have changed -- could they ever
be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up, or
take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller scale, the
question was old and unanswered. All the so-called primitive races,
and some nearer survivals, had raised doubts which persisted against
the most obstinate convictions of evolution. The Senator himself
shook his head, and after surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content,
went on to St. Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince
Khilkoff. Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had
been immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the
people seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or
fifteen years of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for,
since 1898, Russia lagged.

The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed disposed
to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For him, all opinion
founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be
complete, and their relations must be always infinite. Very likely,
Russia would instantly become the most brilliant constellation of
human progress through all the ordered stages of good; but meanwhile
one might give a value as movement of inertia to the mass, and assume
a slow acceleration that would, at the end of a generation, leave the
gap between east and west relatively the same. This result reached,
the Lodges thought their moral improvement required a visit to
Berlin; but forty years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams's
memories of Berlin, and he preferred, at any cost, to escape new
ones. When the Lodges started for Germany, Adams took steamer for
Sweden and landed happily, in a day or two, at Stockholm.

Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he
gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt
whether Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand Duke,
or the Emperor, knew much more about it than their neighbors; and
Adams was quite sure that, even in America, he should listen with
uncertain confidence to the views of any Secretary of the Treasury,
or railway president, or President of the United States whom he had
ever known, that should concern the America of the next generation.
The mere fact that any man should dare to offer them would prove his
incompetence to judge. Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated
as an object of unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she
represented three- fourths of the human race, and her movement might
be the true movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure
acceleration of America. No one could yet know what would best suit
humanity, and the tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught
himself talking as bear or as monkey according to the mirror he held
before him. "Am I satisfied? " he asked: --

"Moi? pourquoi non? N'ai-je pas
quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres? Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne
m'a rien reproche; Mais pour mon frere l'ours, on ne l'a
qu'ebauche; Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."
Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in details, his
own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or decorative, nor was
he in the least sure what form it might take even in one generation.
He had himself never ventured to dream of three. No man could guess
what the Daimler motor and X-rays would do to him; but so much was
sure; the monkey and motor were terribly afraid of the bear; how
much,- only a man close to their foreign departments knew. As the
monkey looked back across the Baltic from the safe battlements of
Stockholm, Russia looked more portentous than from the Kremlin.

The image was that of the retreating ice-cap -- a wall of
archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever at
its mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that crossed
the level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea, merely extended
the northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and Poles on one side still
struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained their own
energies under the same conditions that caused inertia across the
frontier. Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race;
and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how
it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at
the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its
very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the
clue, history was a nursery tale.

The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous mass of
inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever Russia
moved. From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it were an
ice-sheet, and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries. In contrast
with the dreary forests of Russia and the stern streets of St.
Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and Sweden lured the
tourist on. Through a cheerful New England landscape and bright
autumn, he rambled northwards till he found himself at Trondhjem and
discovered Norway. Education crowded upon him in immense masses as he
triangulated these vast surfaces of history about which he had
lectured and read for a life-time. When the historian fully realizes
his ignorance -- which sometimes happens to Americans -- he becomes
even more tiresome to himself than to others, because his naivete is
irrepressible. Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he
had preached the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and
beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair
of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started
voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he took the mail
steamer to the north, and on September 14, reached Hammerfest.

Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the deep
fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and reindeer
were watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate channels outside,
as their ancestors had watched the first Norse fishermen learn them
in the succession of time; but it was not the Laps, or the snow, or
the arctic gloom, that impressed the tourist, so much as the lights
of an electro-magnetic civilization and the stupefying contrast with
Russia, which more and more insisted on taking the first place in
historical interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously
corrected the errors of the old, or so effectively redressed the
balance of the ecliptic. As one approached the end -- the spot where,
seventy years before, a futile Carlylean Teufelsdrockh had stopped to
ask futile questions of the silent infinite -- the infinite seemed to
have become loquacious, not to say familiar, chattering gossip in
one's ear. An installation of electric lighting and telephones led
tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of the
magnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdrockh sat dumb with
surprise, and glared at the permanent electric lights of
Hammerfest.

He had good reason -- better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had
ever told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without means
of speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to
gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, breakfasting in the
restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across, the neighboring
table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, announcing an attempt on
the life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Trondhjem, and
so up the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling
of the President's condition, and the doings and sayings of Hay and
Roosevelt, until at last a little journal was cried on reaching some
dim haven, announcing the President's death a few hours before. To
Adams the death of McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not
wholly void of personal emotion, but this was little in comparison
with his depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most
intimate friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to
please him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. The
electro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.

No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines of
unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across the
gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an abyss.
Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial
ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision, and
no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these
spectral islands without consciousness that only a day's steaming to
the northward would bring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment
to advance, which obliged tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer
and Norse fishermen had stopped so long ago that memory of their very
origin was lost. Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew
not what to make of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his
Norwegian fishermen ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of
thousands, jammed with their faces to the sea, the ice on the north,
the ice-cap of Russian inertia pressing from behind, and the ice a
trifling danger compared with the inertia. From the day they first
followed the retreating ice-cap round the North Cape, down to the
present moment, their problem was the same.

The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long
line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took
possession, divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate
or geography or soil.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered south
again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne. A mere
glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind. Hamburg was
almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the green rusticity
of Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham. The Rhine
in 1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as it resembled the Rhine of
the Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway centre that had completed its
cathedral which bore an absent- minded air of a cathedral of Chicago.
The thirteenth century, carefully strained-off, catalogued, and
locked up, was visible to tourists as a kind of Neanderthal,
cave-dwelling, curiosity. The Rhine was more modern than the Hudson,
as might well be, since it produced far more coal; but all this
counted for little beside the radical change in the lines of
force.

In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the
Danube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the
prehistoric highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade-route
followed the old routes of invasion, and Cologne was a resting-place
between Warsaw and Flanders. Throughout northern Germany, Russia was
felt even more powerfully than France. In 1901 Russia had vanished,
and not even France was felt; hardly England or America. Coal alone
was felt -- its stamp alone pervaded the Rhine district and persisted
to Picardy -- and the stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and
Pittsburgh. The Rhine produced the same power, and the power produced
the same people -- the same mind -- the same impulse. For a man
sixty-three years old who had no hope of earning a living, these
three months of education were the most arduous he ever attempted,
and Russia was the most indigestible morsel he ever met; but the sum
of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable. From Hammerfest to
Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean -- from Halifax to Norfolk on the
other -- one great empire was ruled by one great emperor -- Coal.
Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or divide it, but
the power and the empire were one. Unity had gained that ground.
Beyond lay Russia, and there an older, perhaps a surer, power,
resting on the eternal law of inertia, held its own.

As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers
became more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian inertia
was moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in its path.
As long as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de Witte fall, Hay
would totter. One could only sit down and watch the doings of Mr. de
Witte and Mr. de Plehve.