| CHAPTER XXIV
| -1 | |
| INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
| 0 | |
| The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life
to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap
in peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had
reason to be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no
such sense of power and momentum, and had seen no such number of
personal friends wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for
much in one's contentment, but the sense of winning one's game
counts for more; and in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly
interesting to the last survivor of the Legation of 1861. He
thought himself perhaps the only person living who could get full
enjoyment of the drama. He carried every scene of it, in a
century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite alive in his mind
-- all the interminable disputes of his disputatious ancestors as
far back as the year 1750 -- as well as his own insignificance in
the Civil War, every step in which had the object of bringing
England into an American system. For this they had written
libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war,
losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle and patient
Puritan nature of their descendants, until even their private
secretaries at times used language almost intemperate; and
suddenly, by pure chance, the blessing fell on Hay. After two
hundred years of stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument
and no violence affected, the people of England learned their
lesson just at the moment when Hay would otherwise have faced a
flood of the old anxieties. Hay himself scarcely knew how
grateful he should be, for to him the change came almost of
course. He saw only the necessary stages that had led to it, and
to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still living in the
atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance
of Germany as the grizzly terror which, in twenty years effected
what Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain -- frightened
England into America's arms -- seemed as melodramatic as any plot
of Napoleon the Great. He could feel only the sense of
satisfaction at seeing the diplomatic triumph of all his family,
since the breed existed, at last realized under his own eyes for
the advantage of his oldest and closest ally.
| 1 | |
| This was history, not education, yet it taught something
exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson.
For the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible
purpose working itself out in history. Probably no one else on
this earthly planet -- not even Hay -- could have come out on
precisely such extreme personal satisfaction, but as he sat at
Hay's table, listening to any member of the British Cabinet, for
all were alike now, discuss the Philippines as a question of
balance of power in the East, he could see that the family work
of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand
perspective of true empire-building, which Hay's work set off
with artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations
looked stronger and larger in scale for the refinement and
certainty of the arcade. In the long list of famous American
Ministers in London, none could have given the work quite the
completeness, the harmony, the perfect ease of Hay.
| 2 | |
| Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law
in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it,
for chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal
property by inheritance in this proof of sequence and
intelligence in the affairs of man -- a property which no one
else had right to dispute; and this personal triumph left him a
little cold towards the other diplomatic results of the war. He
knew that Porto Rico must be taken, but he would have been glad
to escape the Philippines. Apart from too intimate an
acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas, he knew
the West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the
American people might think or say about it, they would sooner or
later have to police those islands, not against Europe, but for
Europe, and America too. Education on the outskirts of civilized
life teaches not very much, but it taught this; and one felt no
call to shoulder the load of archipelagoes in the antipodes when
one was trying painfully to pluck up courage to face the labor of
shouldering archipelagoes at home. The country decided otherwise,
and one acquiesced readily enough since the matter concerned only
the public willingness to carry loads; in London, the balance of
power in the East came alone into discussion; and in every point
of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the result as
though one had shared in the danger, instead of being vigorously
employed in looking on from a great distance. After all, friends
had done the work, if not one's self, and he too serves a certain
purpose who only stands and cheers.
| 3 | |
| In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they
made a sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms
rivalling those of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many
beautiful places scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler
or more genial than Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the
Saxons, its avenues, its terraces, its deer-park, its large
repose on the Kentish hillside, and its broad outlook over whet
was once the forest of Anderida. Filled with a constant stream of
guests, the house seemed to wait for the chance to show its
charms to the American, with whose activity the whole world was
resounding; and never since the battle of Hastings could the
little telegraph office of the Kentish village have done such
work. There, on a hot July 4, 1898, to an expectant group under
the shady trees, came the telegram announcing the destruction of
the Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen Elizabeth in
1588; and there, later in the season, came the order summoning
Hay to the State Department.
| 4 | |
| Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as
he. No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries
of State, or how little strength he had in reserve against it.
Even at Surrenden he showed none too much endurance, and he would
gladly have found a valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on
both sides was earnest, but the decided voice of the conclave was
that, though if he were a mere office-seeker he might certainly
decline promotion, if he were a member of the Government he could
not. No serious statesman could accept a favor and refuse a
service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in that case he must
resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen fascination
for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old
drawback of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes,
even though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him,
no doubt, the service, though hard, might bring some share of
profit, but for the friends who gave this unselfish decision, all
would prove loss. For one, Adams on that subject had become a
little daft. No one in his experience had ever passed unscathed
through that malarious marsh. In his fancy, office was poison; it
killed -- body and soul -- physically and socially. Office was
more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it
held more power; but the poison he complained of was not
ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence
for that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits;
his poison was that of the will -- the distortion of sight -- the
warping of mind -- the degradation of tissue -- the coarsening of
taste -- the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged
rat. Hay needed no office in order to wield influence. For him,
influence lay about the streets, waiting for him to stoop to it;
he enjoyed more than enough power without office; no one of his
position, wealth, and political experience, living at the centre
of politics in contact with the active party managers, could
escape influence. His only ambition was to escape annoyance, and
no one knew better than he that, at sixty years of age, sensitive
to physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality,
vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost of life.
| 5 | |
| Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made presence of
gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner
and lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the
lighter for their humor, and his obedience to the President's
order was the gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams
took dark views, too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own,
for, while Hay had at least the honors of office, his friends
would share only the ennuis of it; but, as usual with Hay,
nothing was gained by taking such matters solemnly, and old
habits of the Civil War left their mark of military drill on
every one who lived through it. He shouldered his pack and
started for home. Adams had no mind to lose his friend without a
struggle, though he had never known such sort of struggle to
avail. The chance was desperate, but he could not afford to throw
it away; so, as soon as the Surrenden establishment broke up, on
October 17, he prepared for return home, and on November 13, none
too gladly, found himself again gazing into La Fayette Square.
| 6 | |
| He had made another false start and lost two years more of
education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics
nor society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do
with Hay's politics at home or abroad, and never affected
agreement with his views or his methods, nor did Hay care whether
his friends agreed or disagreed. They all united in trying to
help each other to get along the best way they could, and all
they tried to save was the personal relation. Even there, Adams
would have been beaten had he not been helped by Mrs. Hay, who
saw the necessity of distraction, and led her husband into the
habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend off for an
hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards,
and a chat with any one who called.
| 7 | |
| For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits
which were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right
to be called pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued
nothing, but drifted as attraction offered itself. The short
session broke up the Washington circle, so that, on March 22,
Adams was able to sail with the Lodges for Europe and to pass
April in Sicily and Rome.
| 8 | |
| With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had
left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of
1860, but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only
catastrophe and violence, running riot on that theme ever since
Ulysses began its study on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in
anarchy, without a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and
defies evolution. Syracuse teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome
was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli seemed more and more to
draw all the threads of thought to a centre, for every new
journey led back to its steps -- Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi,
Mycencae, Constantinople, Syracuse -- all lying on the road to
the Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches
could not yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of
moral; and New York sent most of all, for, in forty years,
America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of
1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same
plane with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read
of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of
Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew
the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with
political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The
climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as
though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.
| 9 | |
| Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
obvious -- in no way unpleasant -- truth; therefore one sat
silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the
lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview
with St. Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the
most satisfactory -- or sufficient -- ever offered; worth fully
forty years' more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself,
or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most
bewildering effect of all these fresh cross-lights on the old
Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast
between what he had taught then and what he found himself
confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards --
between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his
sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes
of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of
derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac
and Soc: --
| 10 | |
HIC JACET
HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
DOCTOR BARBARICUS
HENRICUS ADAMS
ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
PRIMO EXPLICUIT
SOCNAM
| 11 | |
| The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as
satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal
meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have
scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality;
but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir
Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac
and Soc. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and
that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's
scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other
path to a profession.
| 12 | |
| The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its
own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and
solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams
returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to
admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any
case it no longer mattered. He passed a summer of solitude
contrasting sadly with the last at Surrenden; but the solitude
did what the society did not -- it forced and drove him into the
study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last he entered the
practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could no
longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a
methodical survey -- a triangulation -- of the twelfth century.
The pursuit had a singular French charm which France had long
lost -- a calmness, lucidity, simplicity of expression, vigor of
action, complexity of local color, that made Paris flat. In the
long summer days one found a sort of saturated green pleasure in
the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the little
twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassuming as their
own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches;
but churches were many and summer was short, so that he was at
last driven back to the quays and photographs. For weeks he lived
in silence.
| 13 | |
| His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new
value. Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since
1850 John La Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry
Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the question how much
he owed to La Farge could be answered only by admitting that he
had no standard to measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge
alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the
commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had
vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The
American mind -- the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western
-- likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny
something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional
approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion,
as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly
asserting its unconventionality. The most disconcerting trait of
John La Farge was his reversal of the process. His approach was
quiet and indirect; he moved round an object, and never separated
it from its surroundings; he prided himself on faithfulness to
tradition and convention; he was never abrupt and abhorred
dispute. His manners and attitude towards the universe were the
same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
sketching the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of
sea-sickness, or drinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of
Japan, or sipping his cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of
Samoan chiefs, or reflecting under the sacred bo-tree at
Anaradjpura.
| 14 | |
| One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but
always there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it
flowed, for even a contradiction was to him only a shade of
difference, a complementary color, about which no intelligent
artist would dispute. Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams,
you reason too much!" was one of his standing reproaches even in
the mild discussion of rice and mangoes in the warm night of
Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed Adams for being born in
Boston. The mind resorts to reason for want of training, and
Adams had never met a perfectly trained mind.
| 15 | |
| To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone -- a
shade -- a nuance -- and the finer the tone, the truer the
eccentricity. Of course all artists hold more or less the same
point of view in their art, but few carry it into daily life, and
often the contrast is excessive between their art and their talk.
One evening Humphreys Johnston, who was devoted to La Farge,
asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge was ill -- more
ill than usual even for him -- but he admired and liked Whistler,
and insisted on going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to
overhear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear
that of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At that moment the
Boer War was raging, and, as every one knows, on that subject
Whistler raged worse than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed
against England -- witty, declamatory, extravagant, bitter,
amusing, and noisy; but in substance what he said was not merely
commonplace -- it was true! That is to say, his hearers,
including Adams and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed with it
all, and mostly as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent,
and this difference of expression was a difference of art.
Whistler in his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far
beyond any point reached by La Farge, or even attempted; but in
talk he showed, above or below his color-instinct, a willingness
to seem eccentric where no real eccentricity, unless perhaps of
temper, existed.
| 16 | |
| This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his painting,
La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value
of La Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams was
too ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible
more ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to
the twelfth century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt
at home, but felt a sort of ownership. No other American had a
right there, unless he too were a member of the Church and worked
in glass. Adams himself was an interloper, but long habit led La
Farge to resign himself to Adams as one who meant well, though
deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, though near sixty years old
before he knew anything either of glass or of Chartres, asked no
better than to learn, and only La Farge could help him, for he
knew enough at least to see that La Farge alone could use glass
like a thirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been dead
for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge felt
the early glass rather as a document than as a historical
emotion, and in hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and
Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant to hold their
own against a color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La
Farge's mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of
light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In
glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his
personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before
seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.
| 17 | |
| Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a
step backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health became
more and more alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back
to New York, January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to
Washington to find out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could
be hoped, for Hay's troubles had begun, and were quite as great
as he had foreseen. Adams saw as little encouragement as Hay
himself did, though he dared not say so. He doubted Hay's
endurance, the President's firmness in supporting him, and the
loyalty of his party friends; but all this worry on Hay's account
fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War did on his own.
Here was a problem in his political education that passed all
experience since the Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to his
astonishment, very few Americans seemed to share his point of
view; their hostility to England seemed mere temper; but to Adams
the war became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from
childhood, even in England, that his forbears and their
associates in 1776 had settled, once for all, the liberties of
the British free colonies, and he very strongly objected to being
thrown on the defensive again, and forced to sit down, a hundred
and fifty years after John Adams had begun the task, to prove, by
appeal to law and fact, that George Washington was not a felon,
whatever might be the case with George III. For reasons still
more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain question of
the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even further, and
avow the opinion that if at any time England should take towards
Canada the position she took towards her Boer colonies, the
United States would be bound, by their record, to interpose, and
to insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him
the attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed
exceedingly un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.
| 18 | |
| Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue,
and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it
could never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with
theoretical objections which were every day fretting him in
practical forms. Hay's chance lay in patience and good-temper
till the luck should turn, and to him the only object was time;
but as political education the point seemed vital to Adams, who
never liked shutting his eyes or denying an evident fact.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and
politics are two different and often contradictory things. In
this case, the contradiction seemed crude.
| 19 | |
| With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram
Hewitt, Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden -- men who played
the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule,
much better than the professionals, but whose aims were
considerably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt
no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work. In return, the
professionals felt no great love for them, and set them aside
when they could. Only their control of money made them
inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. The
story of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman
series, and that of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside
the one; President Harrison set aside the other. "There is no
politics in it," was his comment on Hay's appointment to office.
Hay held a different opinion and turned to McKinley whose
judgment of men was finer than common in Presidents. Mr. McKinley
brought to the problem of American government a solution which
lay very far outside of Henry Adams's education, but which seemed
to be at least practical and American. He undertook to pool
interests in a general trust into which every interest should be
taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should,
under his management, create efficiency. He achieved very
remarkable results. How much they cost was another matter; if the
public is ever driven to its last resources and the usual
remedies of chaos, the result will probably cost more.
| 20 | |
| Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of
whom was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and
his task hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by
simply paying their price; but abroad whatever helped on one
side, hurt him on another. Hay thought England must be brought
first into the combine; but at that time Germany, Russia, and
France were all combining against England, and the Boer War
helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally, abroad or at home,
except Pauncefote, and Adams always maintained that Pauncefote
alone pulled him through.
| 21 | |
| Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more
unmanageable, even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was
less the fault of the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of
peace, in any normal state of things," said Hay, "ought to be
ratified with unanimity in twenty-four hours. They wasted six
weeks in wrangling over this one, and ratified it with one vote
to spare. We have five or six matters now demanding settlement. I
can settle them all, honorably and advantageously to our own
side; and I am assured by leading men in the Senate that not one
of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the Senate. I should
have a majority in every case, but a malcontent third would
certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the
original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of
our politics. You must understand, it is not merely my solution
the Senate will reject. They will reject, for instance, any
treaty, whatever, on any subject, with England. I doubt if they
would accept any treaty of consequence with Russia or Germany.
The recalcitrant third would be differently composed, but it
would be on hand. So that the real duties of a Secretary of State
seem to be three: to fight claims upon us by other States; to
press more or less fraudulent claims of our own citizens upon
other countries; to find offices for the friends of Senators when
there are none. Is it worth while -- for me -- to keep up this
useless labor?"
| 22 | |
| To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it
in a dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred
years before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be
humorous. The intrigue was too open to be interesting. The
interference of the German and Russian legations, and of the
Clan-na-Gael, with the press and the Senate was innocently
undisguised. The charming Russian Minister, Count Cassini, the
ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days pass
without appealing through the press to the public against the
government. The German Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously
did the same thing, and of course every whisper of theirs was
brought instantly to the Department. These three forces, acting
with the regular opposition and the natural obstructionists,
could always stop action in the Senate. The fathers had intended
to neutralize the energy of government and had succeeded, but
their machine was never meant to do the work of a twenty-million
horse-power society in the twentieth century, where much work
needed to be quickly and efficiently done. The only defence of
the system was that, as Government did nothing well, it had best
do nothing; but the Government, in truth, did perfectly well all
it was given to do; and even if the charge were true, it applied
equally to human society altogether, if one chose to treat
mankind from that point of view. As a matter of mechanics, so
much work must be done; bad machinery merely added to friction.
| 23 | |
| Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
treated the world as something to be taken in block without
pulling it to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all:
he laughed and accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would
have gladly lived his entire life over again exactly as it
happened. In the whole New York school, one met a similar dash of
humor and cynicism more or less pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet
even the gayest of tempers succumbs at last to constant friction
The old friend was rapidly fading. The habit remained, but the
easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual humor, the
equality of indifference, were sinking into the routine of
office; the mind lingered in the Department; the thought failed
to react; the wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of
politics, and the irritations multiplied. To a head of bureau,
the result seemed ennobling.
| 24 | |
| Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that
these political and social and scientific values of the twelfth
and twentieth centuries should be correlated in some relation of
movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care
in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or
that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula
beyond the schoolboy s = gt^2/2. If Kepler and Newton could take
liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person in a remote
wilderness like La Fayette Square could take liberties with
Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction into the
square of its time. He had only to find a value, even
infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical
formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar
universe weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like
this was one in which he could look for no help from anybody --
he could look only for derision at best.
| 25 | |
| All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as
futile and almost immoral -- certainly hostile to sound
historical system. Adams tried it only because of its hostility
to all that he had taught for history, since he started afresh
from the new point that, whatever was right, all he had ever
taught was wrong. He had pursued ignorance thus far with success,
and had swept his mind clear of knowledge. In beginning again,
from the starting-point of Sir Isaac Newton, he looked about him
in vain for a teacher. Few men in Washington cared to overstep
the school conventions, and the most distinguished of them, Simon
Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to treat such a scheme
seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his rank in
science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams never
enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most
distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more
accessible, to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning
whenever he wanted an outlet for his vast reservoirs of
ignorance. Langley listened with outward patience to his
disputatious questionings; but he too nourished a scientific
passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its avowal. He
had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing
between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great
observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most
physicists, he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the
amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting
unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the
problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper,
even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their
existence, while doubting their respectability. He generously let
others doubt what he felt obliged to affirm; and early put into
Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern Science," a volume by Judge
Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen years by the schools
with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably meets every
revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.
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| Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be
as ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science
meant nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not
enough, or was too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never
to direction or progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it
needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction,
relation. Everything must be made to move together; one must seek
new worlds to measure; and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once
more, and found himself on May 12 settled in rooms at the very
door of the Trocadero.
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|