Chapter XXXV. Nunc Age (1905)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary
landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they
saw American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the
plains. As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man
than either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more
striking than ever -- wonderful -- unlike anything man had ever seen
-- and like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the
city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied
meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have
asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great
masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the air and
movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent
of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought
under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet
wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had
made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and
afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces,
condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man -- a
man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old
type -- for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one
jolted over the pavements or read the last week's newspapers, the new
man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end
of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic. Every one
saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in
the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil
of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian,
witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the
solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come
or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity
roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in
sight.

Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington
to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and
battling Trusts. With the Battle of Trusts, a student of mechanics
felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of politics or society,
but also as a measure of motion. The Trusts and Corporations stood
for the larger part of the new power that had been created since
1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous
energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions
and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of
herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot. As
one of their earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had
learned submission and silence, for he knew that, under the laws of
mechanics, any change, within the range of the forces, must make his
situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curious to see
whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man, since no
other energies seemed left on earth to breed. The new man could be
only a child born of contact between the new and the old energies.

Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown,
and neither had warped the umpire's judgment by its favors. If ever
judge had reason to be impartial, it was he. The sole object of his
interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one watched,
the less could be seen of him. Of the forces behind the Trusts, one
could see something; they owned a complete organization, with
schools, training, wealth and purpose; but of the forces behind
Roosevelt one knew little; their cohesion was slight; their training
irregular; their objects vague. The public had no idea what practical
system it could aim at, or what sort of men could manage it. The
single problem before it was not so much to control the Trusts as to
create the society that could manage the Trusts. The new American
must be either the child of the new forces or a chance sport of
nature. The attraction of mechanical power had already wrenched the
American mind into a crab-like process which Roosevelt was making
heroic efforts to restore to even action, and he had every right to
active support and sympathy from all the world, especially from the
Trusts themselves so far as they were human; but the doubt persisted
whether the force that educated was really man or nature -- mind or
motion. The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to
require that the law of mass should rule. In that case, progress
would continue as before.

In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was
as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had been
to the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for holding his
tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no more than for
the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an approach to measurement
of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years. At
the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very
soon pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was
futile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If
the acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces,
were to continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950
should be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as
accurately as that of the November meteoroids.

Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as
the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators. Above
all, it was profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage effort. On
the other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and to economize
waste of mind. If it was not itself education, it pointed out the
economies necessary for the education of the new American. There, the
duty stopped.

There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a
singular sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly five
thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses of
seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in peace.
"Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have been past
believing that a dying seal could have transported itself over fifty
miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface," but "the seal seems often to
crawl to the shore or the ice to die, probably from its instinctive
dread of its marine enemies." In India, Purun Dass, at the end of
statesmanship, sought solitude, and died in sanctity among the deer
and monkeys, rather than remain with man. Even in America, the Indian
Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the
season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone -- but never
hustled. For that reason, one's own passive obscurity seemed
sometimes nearer nature than John Hay's exposure. To the normal
animal the instinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves
were not exempt from the passion of baiting their bears; but in its
turn even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by
creatures that have not the strength or the teeth to kill him
outright.

On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a glance
that Hay must have rest. Already Mrs. Hay had bade him prepare to
help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the Session should be
over, and although Hay protested that the idea could not even be
discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that he could not
effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding without struggle. He
would equally have resigned office and retired, like Purun Dass, had
not the President and the press protested; but he often debated the
subject, and his friends could throw no light on it. Adams himself,
who had set his heart on seeing Hay close his career by making peace
in the East, could only urge that vanity for vanity, the crown of
peacemaker was worth the cross of martyrdom; but the cross was full
in sight, while the crown was still uncertain. Adams found his
formula for Russian inertia exasperatingly correct. He thought that
Russia should have negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur,
January 1, 1905; he found that she had not the energy, but meant to
wait till her navy should be destroyed. The delay measured precisely
the time that Hay had to spare.

The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the strength
to crawl on board ship, March 18, and before his steamer had reached
half her course, he had revived, almost as gay as when he first
lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four years earlier. The
clouds that gather round the setting sun do not always take a sober
coloring from eyes that have kept watch on mortality; or, at least,
the sobriety is sometimes scarcely sad. One walks with one's friends
squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye with a smile.
One has done it so often! Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he
nourished no illusions; he was convinced that he should never return
to his work, and he talked lightly of the death sentence that he
might any day expect, but he threw off the coloring of office and
mortality together, and the malaria of power left its only trace in
the sense of tasks incomplete.

One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his dozen
treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in a
butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly
completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly every
old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little or nothing
to annoy his successor. He had brought the great Atlantic powers into
a working system, and even Russia seemed about to be dragged into a
combine of intelligent equilibrium based on an intelligent allotment
of activities. For the first time in fifteen hundred years a true
Roman pax was in sight, and would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues
to him. Except for making peace in Manchuria, he could do no more;
and if the worst should happen, setting continent against continent
in arms -- the only apparent alternative to his scheme -- he need not
repine at missing the catastrophe.

This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting
statesman feels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to get out
one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on either side.
Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy? The Kaiser
supplied him with these figures, just as the Cretic approached
Morocco. Every one was doing it, and seemed in a panic about it. The
chaos waited only for his landing.

Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at Nervi,
and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and heard
no call for action. Then they all went on to Nanheim without relapse.
There, after a few days, Adams left him for the regular treatment,
and came up to Paris. The medical reports promised well, and Hay's
letters were as humorous and light-handed as ever. To the last he
wrote cheerfully of his progress, and amusingly with his usual light
scepticism, of his various doctors; but when the treatment ended,
three weeks later, and he came on to Paris, he showed, at the first
glance, that he had lost strength, and the return to affairs and
interviews wore him rapidly out. He was conscious of it, and in his
last talk before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of
his activity for granted. "You must hold out for the peace
negotiations," was the remonstrance. "I've not time!" he replied.
"You'll need little time!" was the rejoinder. Each was correct.

There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than the
commonplace to express what is incapable of expression. "The rest is
silence!" The few familiar words, among the simplest in the language,
conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry, served Shakespeare, and, as
yet, no one has said more. A few weeks afterwards, one warm evening
in early July, as Adams was strolling down to dine under the trees at
Armenonville, he learned that Hay was dead. He expected it; on Hay's
account, he was even satisfied to have his friend die, as we would
all die if we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universally
regretted, and wielding his power to the last. One had seen scores of
emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when alive; and
now, at least, one had not that to fear for one's friend. It was not
even the suddenness of the shock, or the sense of void, that threw
Adams into the depths of Hamlet's Shakespearean silence in the full
flare of Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity
reached its most futile climax in human history; it was only the
quiet summons to follow -- the assent to dismissal. It was time to
go. The three friends had begun life together; and the last of the
three had no motive -- no attraction -- to carry it on after the
others had gone. Education had ended for all three, and only beyond
some remoter horizon could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps
some day -- say 1938, their centenary -- they might be allowed to
return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives
made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and
perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among
the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid
natures could regard without a shudder.

THE END