| CHAPTER XXI
| -1 | |
| TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
| 0 | |
| ONCE more! this is a story of education, not of adventure! It
is meant to help young men -- or such as have intelligence enough
to seek help -- but it is not meant to amuse them. What one did
-- or did not do -- with one's education, after getting it, need
trouble the inquirer in no way; it is a personal matter only
which would confuse him. Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth
educating; most keen judges incline to think that barely one man
in a hundred owns a mind capable of reacting to any purpose on
the forces that surround him, and fully half of these react
wrongly. The object of education for that mind should be the
teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy. No doubt the
world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as
to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did for
Henry Adams; but education should try to lessen the obstacles,
diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train
minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of
force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of
little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. Throughout
human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this
story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No
doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands
behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is
stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and
the most favored have overcome the friction or the viscosity of
inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of their
energy in doing it.
| 1 | |
| Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871,
and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At
the end of twenty years, he found that he had finished, and could
sum up the result. He had no complaint to make against man or
woman. They had all treated him kindly; he had never met with
ill-will, ill-temper, or even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He
had never seen serious dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a
readiness in the young to respond to suggestion that seemed to
him far beyond all he had reason to expect. Considering the stock
complaints against the world, he could not understand why he had
nothing to complain of.
| 2 | |
| During these twenty years he had done as much work, in
quantity, as his neighbors wanted; more than they would ever stop
to look at, and more than his share. Merely in print, he thought
altogether ridiculous the number of volumes he counted on the
shelves of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served
a useful purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of
his friends, even the artists, none of whom held any lofty
opinion of their success in raising the standards of society, or
felt profound respect for the methods or manners of their time,
at home or abroad, but all of whom had tried, in a way, to hold
the standard up. The effort had been, for the older generation,
exhausting, as one could see in the Hunts; but the generation
after 1870 made more figure, not in proportion to public wealth
or in the census, but in their own self-assertion. A fair number
of the men who were born in the thirties had won names --
Phillips Brooks; Bret Harte; Henry James; H. H. Richardson; John
La Farge; and the list might be made fairly long if it were worth
while; but from their school had sprung others, like Augustus St.
Gaudens, McKim, Stanford White, and scores born in the forties,
who counted as force even in the mental inertia of sixty or
eighty million people. Among all these Clarence King, John Hay,
and Henry Adams had led modest existences, trying to fill in the
social gaps of a class which, as yet, showed but thin ranks and
little cohesion. The combination offered no very glittering
prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years with as much
patience and effort as though it led to fame or power, until, at
last, Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficiently performed
and his account with society settled. He had enjoyed his life
amazingly, and would not have exchanged it for any other that
came in his way; he was, or thought he was, perfectly satisfied
with it; but for reasons that had nothing to do with education,
he was tired; his nervous energy ran low; and, like a horse that
wears out, he quitted the race-course, left the stable, and
sought pastures as far as possible from the old. Education had
ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so
little!
| 3 | |
| As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the
question of return imposed its verdict on him after much
fruitless effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of
January, 1892; he was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of
midwinter. He was close on his fifty-fourth birthday, and Pall
Mall had forgotten him as completely as it had forgotten his
elders. He had not seen London for a dozen years, and was rather
amused to have only a bed for a world and a familiar black fog
for horizon. The coal-fire smelt homelike; the fog had a fruity
taste of youth; anything was better than being turned out into
the wastes of Wigmore Street. He could always amuse himself by
living over his youth, and driving once more down Oxford Street
in 1858, with life before him to imagine far less amusing than it
had turned out to be.
| 4 | |
| The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week he
reflected on what he could do next. He had just come up from the
South Seas with John La Farge, who had reluctantly crawled away
towards New York to resume the grinding routine of studio-work at
an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as choice, have
gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in the
trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark
purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not
that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly
he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard Kipling's
"Mandalay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem, like
millions of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world
exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of
beginning a new education. The old one had been poor enough; any
new one could only add to its faults. Life had been cut in
halves, and the old half had passed away, education and all,
leaving no stock to graft on.
| 5 | |
| The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him
fantastic Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some
kind of existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it
reasonable. In Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the
dismal ballets at the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at
the old Palais Royal; but, except for them, his own Paris of the
Second Empire was as extinct as that of the first Napoleon. At
the galleries and exhibitions, he was racked by the effort of art
to be original, and when one day, after much reflection, John La
Farge asked whether there might not still be room for something
simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the world, it was
no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It should
express what it was; and this was something that neither Adams
nor La Farge understood.
| 6 | |
| Under the first blast of this furnace-heat, the lights seemed
fairly to go out. He felt nothing in common with the world as it
promised to be. He was ready to quit it, and the easiest path led
back to the east; but he could not venture alone, and the rarest
of animals is a companion. He must return to America to get one.
Perhaps, while waiting, he might write more history, and on the
chance as a last resource, he gave orders for copying everything
he could reach in archives, but this was mere habit. He went home
as a horse goes back to his stable, because he knew nowhere else
to go.
| 7 | |
| Home was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration ended,
in 1877, and Evarts became Secretary of State, Adams went back
there, partly to write history, but chiefly because his seven
years of laborious banishment, in Boston, convinced him that, as
far as he had a function in life, it was as stable-companion to
statesmen, whether they liked it or not. At about the same time,
old George Bancroft did the same thing, and presently John Hay
came on to be Assistant Secretary of State for Mr. Evarts, and
stayed there to write the "Life" of Lincoln. In 1884 Adams joined
him in employing Richardson to build them adjoining houses on La
Fayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this was it. To the
house on La Fayette Square he must turn, for he had no other
status -- no position in the world.
| 8 | |
| Never did he make a decision more reluctantly than this of
going back to his manger. His father and mother were dead. All
his family led settled lives of their own. Except for two or
three friends in Washington, who were themselves uncertain of
stay, no one cared whether he came or went, and he cared least.
There was nothing to care about. Every one was busy; nearly every
one seemed contented. Since 1871 nothing had ruffled the surface
of the American world, and even the progress of Europe in her
side-way track to dis-Europeaning herself had ceased to be
violent.
After a dreary January in Paris, at last when no excuse could be
persuaded to offer itself for further delay, he crossed the
channel and passed a week with his old friend, Milnes Gaskell, at
Thornes, in Yorkshire, while the westerly gales raved a warning
against going home. Yorkshire in January is not an island in the
South Seas. It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti; not many
to Fiji or Samoa; but, as so often before, it was a rest between
past and future, and Adams was grateful for it.
| 9 | |
| At last, on February 3, he drove, after a fashion, down the
Irish Channel, on board the Teutonic. He had not crossed the
Atlantic for a dozen years, and had never seen an ocean steamer
of the new type. He had seen nothing new of any sort, or much
changed in France or England. The railways made quicker time, but
were no more comfortable. The scale was the same. The Channel
service was hardly improved since 1858, or so little as to make
no impression. Europe seemed to have been stationary for twenty
years. To a man who had been stationary like Europe, the Teutonic
was a marvel. That he should be able to eat his dinner through a
week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That he should have a
deck stateroom, with fresh air, and read all night, if he chose,
by electric light, was matter for more wonder than life had yet
supplied, in its old forms. Wonder may be double -- even treble.
Adams's wonder ran off into figures. As the Niagara was to the
Teutonic -- as 1860 was to 1890 -- so the Teutonic and 1890 must
be to the next term -- and then? Apparently the question
concerned only America. Western Europe offered no such conundrum.
There one might double scale and speed indefinitely without
passing bounds.
| 10 | |
| Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling, on his wedding
trip to America, thanks to the mediation of Henry James, dashed
over the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and wit -- as
though playing a garden hose on a thirsty and faded begonia.
Kipling could never know what peace of mind he gave, for he could
hardly ever need it himself so much; and yet, in the full delight
of his endless fun and variety; one felt the old conundrum repeat
itself. Somehow, somewhere, Kipling and the American were not
one, but two, and could not be glued together. The American felt
that the defect, if defect it were, was in himself; he had felt
it when he was with Swinburne, and, again, with Robert Louis
Stevenson, even under the palms of Vailima; but he did not carry
self-abasement to the point of thinking himself singular.
Whatever the defect might be, it was American; it belonged to the
type; it lived in the blood. Whatever the quality might be that
held him apart, it was English; it lived also in the blood; one
felt it little if at all, with Celts, and one yearned
reciprocally among Fiji cannibals. Clarence King used to say that
it was due to discord between the wave-lengths of the man-atoms;
but the theory offered difficulties in measurement. Perhaps,
after all, it was only that genius soars; but this theory, too,
had its dark corners. All through life, one had seen the American
on his literary knees to the European; and all through many lives
back for some two centuries, one had seen the European snub or
patronize the American; not always intentionally, but
effectually. It was in the nature of things. Kipling neither
snubbed nor patronized; he was all gaiety and good-nature; but he
would have been first to feel what one meant. Genius has to pay
itself that unwilling self-respect.
| 11 | |
| Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again
in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a
return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of
reasons for staying dead. Changes had taken place there;
improvements had been made; with time -- much time -- the city
might become habitable according to some fashionable standard;
but all one's friends had died or disappeared several times over,
leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or London. Slowly, a
certain society had built itself up about the Government; houses
had been opened and there was much dining; much calling; much
leaving of cards; but a solitary man counted for less than in
1868. Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both Executive
and Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have the
ear of anybody in Government. No one in Government knew any
reason for consulting any one in society. The world had ceased to
be wholly political, but politics had become less social. A
survivor of the Civil War -- like George Bancroft, or John Hay --
tried to keep footing, but without brilliant success. They were
free to say or do what they liked; but no one took much notice of
anything said or done.
| 12 | |
| A presidential election was to take place in November, and no
one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were
singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of
them had no friends; the other, only enemies. Calvin Brice, who
was at that time altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of
the Senate, was in the habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in
glowing terms and at great length, as one of the loftiest natures
and noblest characters of ancient or modern time; "but," he
concluded, "in future I prefer to look on at his proceedings from
the safe summit of some neighboring hill." The same remark
applied to Mr. Harrison. In this respect, they were the greatest
of Presidents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies,
was as nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on
their friends. Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To
the American people, the two candidates and the two parties were
so evenly balanced that the scales showed hardly a perceptible
difference. Mr. Harrison was an excellent President, a man of
ability and force; perhaps the best President the Republican
Party had put forward since Lincoln's death; yet, on the whole,
Adams felt a shade of preference for President Cleveland, not so
much personally as because the Democrats represented to him the
last remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of Hosea
Biglow's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a
banker's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years,
more and more despotic over Esop's frog-empire. One might no
longer croak except to vote for King Log, or -- failing storks --
for Grover Cleveland; and even then could not be sure where King
Banker lurked behind. The costly education in politics had led to
political torpor. Every one did not share it. Clarence King and
John Hay were loyal Republicans who never for a moment conceived
that there could be merit in other ideals. With King, the feeling
was chiefly love of archaic races; sympathy with the negro and
Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies; but with Hay,
party loyalty became a phase of being, a little like the loyalty
of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw all the
failings of the party, and still more keenly those of the
partisans; but he could not live outside. To Adams a Western
Democrat or a Western Republican, a city Democrat or a city
Republican, a W. C. Whitney or a J. G. Blaine, were actually the
same man, as far as their usefulness to the objects of King, Hay,
or Adams was concerned. They graded themselves as friends or
enemies not as Republicans or Democrats. To Hay, the difference
was that of being respectable or not.
| 13 | |
| Since 1879, King, Hay, and Adams had been inseparable. Step by
step, they had gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shunning
than inviting public position, until, in 1892, none of them held
any post at all. With great effort, in Hayes's administration,
all King's friends, including Abram Hewitt and Carl Schurz, had
carried the bill for uniting the Surveys and had placed King at
the head of the Bureau; but King waited only to organize the
service, and then resigned, in order to seek his private fortune
in the West. Hay, after serving as Assistant Secretary of State
under Secretary Evarts during a part of Hayes's administration,
then also insisted on going out, in order to write with Nicolay
the "Life" of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and when his
friends asked the reason, he could not go into long explanations,
but preferred to answer simply that no President had ever invited
him to fill one. The reason was good, and was also conveniently
true, but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or capacity.
Why had no President ever cared to employ him? The question
needed a volume of intricate explanation. There never was a day
when he would have refused to perform any duty that the
Government imposed on him, but the American Government never to
his knowledge imposed duties. The point was never raised with
regard to him, or to any one else. The Government required
candidates to offer; the business of the Executive began and
ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social formula
carried this passive attitude a shade further. Any public man who
may for years have used some other man's house as his own, when
promoted to a position of patronage commonly feels himself
obliged to inquire, directly or indirectly, whether his friend
wants anything; which is equivalent to a civil act of divorce,
since he feels awkward in the old relation. The handsomest
formula, in an impartial choice, was the grandly courteous
Southern phrase of Lamar: "Of course Mr. Adams knows that
anything in my power is at his service." A la disposicion de
Usted! The form must have been correct since it released both
parties. He was right; Mr. Adams did know all about it; a bow and
a conventional smile closed the subject forever, and every one
felt flattered.
| 14 | |
| Such an intimate, promoted to power, was always lost. His
duties and cares absorbed him and affected his balance of mind.
Unless his friend served some political purpose, friendship was
an effort. Men who neither wrote for newspapers nor made campaign
speeches, who rarely subscribed to the campaign fund, and who
entered the White House as seldom as possible, placed themselves
outside the sphere of usefulness, and did so with entirely
adequate knowledge of what they were doing. They never expected
the President to ask for their services, and saw no reason why he
should do so. As for Henry Adams, in fifty years that he knew
Washington, no one would have been more surprised than himself
had any President ever asked him to perform so much of a service
as to cross the square. Only Texan Congressmen imagined that the
President needed their services in some remote consulate after
worrying him for months to find one.
| 15 | |
| In Washington this law or custom is universally understood, and
no one's character necessarily suffered because he held no
office. No one took office unless he wanted it; and in turn the
outsider was never asked to do work or subscribe money. Adams saw
no office that he wanted, and he gravely thought that, from his
point of view, in the long run, he was likely to be a more useful
citizen without office. He could at least act as audience, and,
in those days, a Washington audience seldom filled even a small
theatre. He felt quite well satisfied to look on, and from time
to time he thought he might risk a criticism of the players; but
though he found his own position regular, he never quite
understood that of John Hay. The Republican leaders treated Hay
as one of themselves; they asked his services and took his money
with a freedom that staggered even a hardened observer; but they
never needed him in equivalent office. In Washington Hay was the
only competent man in the party for diplomatic work. He
corresponded in his powers of usefulness exactly with Lord
Granville in London, who had been for forty years the saving
grace of every Liberal administration in turn. Had usefulness to
the public service been ever a question, Hay should have had a
first-class mission under Hayes; should have been placed in the
Cabinet by Garfield, and should have been restored to it by
Harrison. These gentlemen were always using him; always invited
his services, and always took his money.
| 16 | |
| Adams's opinion of politics and politicians, as he frankly
admitted, lacked enthusiasm, although never, in his severest
temper, did he apply to them the terms they freely applied to
each other; and he explained everything by his old explanation of
Grant's character as more or less a general type; but what roused
in his mind more rebellion was the patience and good-nature with
which Hay allowed himself to be used. The trait was not confined
to politics. Hay seemed to like to be used, and this was one of
his many charms; but in politics this sort of good-nature demands
supernatural patience. Whatever astonishing lapses of social
convention the politicians betrayed, Hay laughed equally
heartily, and told the stories with constant amusement, at his
own expense. Like most Americans, he liked to play at making
Presidents, but, unlike most, he laughed not only at the
Presidents he helped to make, but also at himself for laughing.
| 17 | |
| One must be rich, and come from Ohio or New York, to gratify an
expensive taste like this. Other men, on both political flanks,
did the same thing, and did it well, less for selfish objects
than for the amusement of the game; but Hay alone lived in
Washington and in the centre of the Ohio influences that ruled
the Republican Party during thirty years. On the whole, these
influences were respectable, and although Adams could not, under
any circumstances, have had any value, even financially, for Ohio
politicians, Hay might have much, as he showed, if they only knew
enough to appreciate him. The American politician was
occasionally an amusing object; Hay laughed, and, for want of
other resource, Adams laughed too; but perhaps it was partly
irritation at seeing how President Harrison dealt his cards that
made Adams welcome President Cleveland back to the White House.
| 18 | |
| At all events, neither Hay nor King nor Adams had much to gain
by reelecting Mr. Harrison in 1892, or by defeating him, as far
as he was concerned; and as far as concerned Mr. Cleveland, they
seemed to have even less personal concern. The whole country, to
outward appearance, stood in much the same frame of mind.
Everywhere was slack-water. Hay himself was almost as languid and
indifferent as Adams. Neither had occupation. Both had finished
their literary work. The "Life" of Lincoln had been begun,
completed, and published hand in hand with the "History" of
Jefferson and Madison, so that between them they had written
nearly all the American history there was to write. The
intermediate period needed intermediate treatment; the gap
between James Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially
filled by either of them. Both were heartily tired of the
subject, and America seemed as tired as they. What was worse, the
redeeming energy of Americans which had generally served as the
resource of minds otherwise vacant, the creation of new force,
the application of expanding power, showed signs of check. Even
the year before, in 1891, far off in the Pacific, one had met
everywhere in the East a sort of stagnation -- a creeping
paralysis -- complaints of shipping and producers -- that spread
throughout the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange
and silver-production loomed large. Credit was shaken, and a
change of party government might shake it even in Washington. The
matter did not concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always
richest when the rich were poor; but it helped to dull the
vibration of society.
| 19 | |
| However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the
last twenty years, for the three friends, King, Hay, and Adams,
was exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years, but
what had they gained? They often discussed the question. Hay had
a singular faculty for remembering faces, and would break off
suddenly the thread of his talk, as he looked out of the window
on La Fayette Square, to notice an old corps commander or admiral
of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his cards or
his cocktail: "There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at
Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!" Or
what drew Adams's closer attention: "There goes old Boutwell
gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they went! Men who had
swayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King,
and Adams, less valued than the ephemeral Congressman behind
them, who could not have told whether the general was a Boutwell
or Boutwell a general. Theirs was the highest known success, and
one asked what it was worth to them. Apart from personal vanity,
what would they sell it for? Would any one of them, from
President downwards, refuse ten thousand a year in place of all
the consideration he received from the world on account of his
success?
| 20 | |
| Yet consideration had value, and at that time Adams enjoyed
lecturing Augustus St. Gaudens, in hours of depression, on its
economics: "Honestly you must admit that even if you don't pay
your expenses you get a certain amount of advantage from doing
the best work. Very likely some of the really successful
Americans would be willing you should come to dinner sometimes,
if you did not come too often, while they would think twice about
Hay, and would never stand me." The forgotten statesman had no
value at all; the general and admiral not much; the historian but
little; on the whole, the artist stood best, and of course,
wealth rested outside the question, since it was acting as judge;
but, in the last resort, the judge certainly admitted that
consideration had some value as an asset, though hardly as much
as ten -- or five -- thousand a year.
| 21 | |
| Hay and Adams had the advantage of looking out of their windows
on the antiquities of La Fayette Square, with the sense of having
all that any one had; all that the world had to offer; all that
they wanted in life, including their names on scores of
title-pages and in one or two biographical dictionaries; but this
had nothing to do with consideration, and they knew no more than
Boutwell or St. Gaudens whether to call it success. Hay had
passed ten years in writing the "Life" of Lincoln, and perhaps
President Lincoln was the better for it, but what Hay got from it
was not so easy to see, except the privilege of seeing popular
book-makers steal from his book and cover the theft by abusing
the author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson and
Madison, with expenses which, in any mercantile business, could
hardly have been reckoned at less than a hundred thousand
dollars, on a salary of five thousand a year; and when he asked
what return he got from this expenditure, rather more extravagant
in proportion to his means than a racing-stable, he could see
none whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Parkman
never printed a first edition of his relatively cheap and popular
volumes, numbering more than seven hundred copies, until quite at
the end of his life. A thousand copies of a book that cost twenty
dollars or more was as much as any author could expect; two
thousand copies was a visionary estimate unless it were canvassed
for subscription. As far as Adams knew, he had but three serious
readers -- Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh, and Hay himself. He was
amply satisfied with their consideration, and could dispense with
that of the other fifty-nine million, nine hundred and
ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven; but neither
he nor Hay was better off in any other respect, and their chief
title to consideration was their right to look out of their
windows on great men, alive or dead, in La Fayette Square, a
privilege which had nothing to do with their writings.
| 22 | |
| The world was always good-natured; civil; glad to be amused;
open-armed to any one who amused it; patient with every one who
did not insist on putting himself in its way, or costing it
money; but this was not consideration, still less power in any of
its concrete forms, and applied as well or better to a comic
actor. Certainly a rare soprano or tenor voice earned infinitely
more applause as it gave infinitely more pleasure, even in
America; but one does what one can with one's means, and casting
up one's balance sheet, one expects only a reasonable return on
one's capital. Hay and Adams had risked nothing and never played
for high stakes. King had followed the ambitious course. He had
played for many millions. He had more than once come close to a
great success, but the result was still in doubt, and meanwhile
he was passing the best years of his life underground. For
companionship he was mostly lost.
| 23 | |
| Thus, in 1892, neither Hay, King, nor Adams knew whether they
had attained success, or how to estimate it, or what to call it;
and the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than they.
Indeed, the American people had no idea at all; they were
wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had
ever trodden about Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden
calves to worship. They had lost the sense of worship; for the
idea that they worshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of
money was an old-world trait; a healthy appetite akin to worship
of the Gods, or to worship of power in any concrete shape; but
the American wasted money more recklessly than any one ever did
before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court
aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not
what to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make
more, or throw it away. Probably, since human society began, it
had seen no such curious spectacle as the houses of the San
Francisco millionaires on Nob Hill. Except for the railway
system, the enormous wealth taken out of the ground since 1840,
had disappeared. West of the Alleghenies, the whole country might
have been swept clean, and could have been replaced in better
form within one or two years. The American mind had less respect
for money than the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its loss
more easily; but it had been deflected by its pursuit till it
could turn in no other direction. It shunned, distrusted,
disliked, the dangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in
history for its ignorance of the past.
| 24 | |
| Personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's
notice. His first step, on returning to Washington, took him out
to the cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see the bronze figure
which St. Gaudens had made for him in his absence. Naturally
every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the
artist; every change of light and shade; every point of relation;
every possible doubt of St. Gaudens's correctness of taste or
feeling; so that, as the spring approached, he was apt to stop
there often to see what the figure had to tell him that was new;
but, in all that it had to say, he never once thought of
questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the one
commonplace about it -- the oldest idea known to human thought.
He knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man,
woman, or child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more
than a glance to reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura
Daibuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to
Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though
it had nothing else to say. The interest of the figure was not in
its meaning, but in the response of the observer. As Adams sat
there, numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have
become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning.
Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were
vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what
would have been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese
jinricksha-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who
taught a lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions
there, and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke
out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure
of despair, of atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest
saw only what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens
held up the mirror and no more. The American layman had lost
sight of ideals; the American priest had lost sight of faith.
Both were more American than the old, half-witted soldiers who
denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which should
have been given for drink.
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| Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain
of self-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to
which all others were subservient, and which absorbed the
energies of some sixty million people to the exclusion of every
other force, real or imaginary. The power of the railway system
had enormously increased since 1870. Already the coal output of
160,000,000 tons closely approached the 180,000,000 of the
British Empire, and one held one's breath at the nearness of what
one had never expected to see, the crossing of courses, and the
lead of American energies. The moment was deeply exciting to a
historian, but the railway system itself interested one less than
in 1868, since it offered less chance for future profit. Adams
had been born with the railway system; had grown up with it; had
been over pretty nearly every mile of it with curious eyes, and
knew as much about it as his neighbors; but not there could he
look for a new education. Incomplete though it was, the system
seemed on the whole to satisfy the wants of society better than
any other part of the social machine, and society was content
with its creation, for the time, and with itself for creating it.
Nothing new was to be done or learned there, and the world
hurried on to its telephones, bicycles, and electric trams. At
past fifty, Adams solemnly and painfully learned to ride the
bicycle.
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| Nothing else occurred to him as a means of new life. Nothing
else offered itself, however carefully he sought. He looked for
no change. He lingered in Washington till near July without
noticing a new idea. Then he went back to England to pass his
summer on the Deeside. In October he returned to Washington and
there awaited the reelection of Mr. Cleveland, which led to no
deeper thought than that of taking up some small notes that
happened to be outstanding. He had seen enough of the world to be
a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers.
Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.
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