| CHAPTER XXXII
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| VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
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| PARIS after midsummer is a place where only the industrious poor
remain, unless they can get away; but Adams knew no spot where
history would be better off, and the calm of the Champs Elysees
was so deep that when Mr. de Witte was promoted to a powerless
dignity, no one whispered that the promotion was disgrace, while
one might have supposed, from the silence, that the Viceroy
Alexeieff had reoccupied Manchuria as a fulfilment of
treaty-obligation. For once, the conspiracy of silence became
crime. Never had so modern and so vital a riddle been put before
Western society, but society shut its eyes. Manchuria knew every
step into war; Japan had completed every preparation; Alexeieff
had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur, mounting his
siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the expected
attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war
conditions; but Europe knew nothing. The banks would allow no
disturbance; the press said not a word, and even the embassies
were silent. Every anarchist in Europe buzzed excitement and
began to collect in groups, but the Hotel Ritz was calm, and the
Grand Dukes who swarmed there professed to know directly from the
Winter Palace that there would be no war.
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| As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed
statesman, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could
see that the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of
experience, he could not understand how the comedy could be so
well acted. Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely
asking every passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their
own except what was directly authorized at St. Petersburg. He
could make nothing of it. He found himself in face of his new
problem -- the workings of Russian inertia -- and he could
conceive no way of forming an opinion how much was real and how
much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace himself. At
times he doubted whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew, but
old diplomatic training forbade him to admit such innocence.
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| This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris. On
January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of
atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his
country think as a world-power. No doubt, Japanese diplomacy had
much to do with this alertness, but the immense superiority of
Japanese diplomacy should have been more evident in Europe than
in America, and in any case, could not account for the total
disappearance of Russian diplomacy. A government by inertia
greatly disconcerted study. One was led to suspect that Cassini
never heard from his Government, and that Lamsdorf knew nothing
of his own department; yet no such suspicion could be admitted.
Cassini resorted to transparent blague: "Japan seemed infatuated
even to the point of war! But what can the Japanese do? As usual,
sit on their heels and pray to Buddha!" One of the oldest and
most accomplished diplomatists in the service could never show
his hand so empty as this if he held a card to play; but he never
betrayed stronger resource behind. "If any Japanese succeed in
entering Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive." The
inertia of Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of
diplomatists, deeply interested a student of race-inertia, whose
mind had lost itself in the attempt to invent scales of force.
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| The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of
the White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the
President. Reticence had no place there. Every one in America saw
that, whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the decisive
struggles in American history was pending, and any presence of
secrecy or indifference was absurd. Interest was acute, and
curiosity intense, for no one knew what the Russian Government
meant or wanted, while war had become a question of days. To an
impartial student who gravely doubted whether the Czar himself
acted as a conscious force or an inert weight, the
straight-forward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a
standard of measure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged
to take the place of his brother Brooks at the Diplomatic
Reception immediately after his return home, and the part of
proxy included his supping at the President's table, with
Secretary Root on one side, the President opposite, and Miss
Chamberlain between them. Naturally the President talked and the
guests listened; which seemed, to one who had just escaped from
the European conspiracy of silence, like drawing a free breath
after stifling. Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an
amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond
any other man of great importance in the world, except the Kaiser
Wilhelm and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at
table; and this evening he spared none. With the usual abuse of
the quos ego, common to vigorous statesmen, he said all that he
thought about Russians and Japanese, as well as about Boers and
British, without restraint, in full hearing of twenty people, to
the entire satisfaction of his listener; and concluded by
declaring that war was imminent; that it ought to be stopped;
that it could be stopped: " I could do it myself; I could stop it
to-morrow!" and he went on to explain his reasons for restraint.
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| That he was right, and that, within another generation, his
successor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow
of doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been
folly when he last supped at the White House in the dynasty of
President Hayes; but the listener cared less for the assertion of
power, than for the vigor of view. The truth was evident enough,
ordinary, even commonplace if one liked, but it was not a truth
of inertia, nor was the method to be mistaken for inert.
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| Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a
force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as
methodically -- as mathematically -- as a demonstration of
Euclid, and Adams thought that as against any but Russians it
would have lost its opening. Each day counted as a measure of
relative energy on the historical scale, and the whole story made
a Grammar of new Science quite as instructive as that of Pearson.
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| The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new
equilibrium which would prove the problem in one sense or
another, and the war had no personal value for Adams except that
it gave Hay his last great triumph. He had carried on his long
contest with Cassini so skillfully that no one knew enough to
understand the diplomatic perfection of his work, which contained
no error; but such success is complete only when it is invisible,
and his victory at last was victory of judgment, not of act. He
could do nothing, and the whole country would have sprung on him
had he tried. Japan and England saved his "open door" and fought
his battle. All that remained for him was to make the peace, and
Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in hand, for
Hay's sake as well as for that of Russia. He thought then that it
could be done in one campaign, for he knew that, in a military
sense, the fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and
every one felt that Hay would inevitably direct it; but the race
was close, and while the war grew every day in proportions, Hay's
strength every day declined.
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| St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted his
portrait, two steps essential to immortality which he bore with a
certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the President
made him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at the
Exposition; and Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for whatever
use he could suppose himself to serve. He professed the religion
of World's Fairs, without which he held education to be a blind
impossibility; and obeyed Mrs. Hay's bidding the more readily
because it united his two educations in one; but theory and
practice were put to equally severe test at St. Louis. Ten years
had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and he found
everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through Ohio
and Indiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys
reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with
scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, formed the setting of every
town. Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the
new American, but this matter of discards concerned the measure
of force little, while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so
much that Adams thought the Secretary of State should have rushed
to the platform at every station to ask who were the people; for
the American of the prime seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee
and the buffalo.
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| The subject grew quickly delicate. History told little about
these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their
race-names, who had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine
and the Danube had turned their floods into the Ohio. John Hay
was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had not been
bred on its shores, and the city of St. Louis had turned its back
on the noblest work of nature, leaving it bankrupt between its
own banks. The new American showed his parentage proudly; he was
the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already,
within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed humanities,
brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into approach
to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing no
distinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American,
like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the
European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church,
and the features would follow the parentage.
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| The St. Louis Exposition was its first creation in the
twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One
saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without
history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital --
without even an element of natural interest except the river
which it studiously ignored -- but doing what London, Paris, or
New York would have shrunk from attempting. This new social
conglomerate, with no tie but its steam-power and not much of
that, threw away thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant as
ephemeral as a stage flat. The world had never witnessed so
marvellous a phantasm by night Arabia's crimson sands had never
returned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long
lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on
thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in
their sensuous depths; all in deep silence, profound solitude,
listening for a voice or a foot-fall or the plash of an oar, as
though the Emir Mirza were displaying the beauties of this City
of Brass, which could show nothing half so beautiful as this
illumination, with its vast, white, monumental solitude, bathed
in the pure light of setting suns. One enjoyed it with iniquitous
rapture, not because of exhibits but rather because of their
want. Here was a paradox like the stellar universe that fitted
one's mental faults. Had there been no exhibits at all, and no
visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the more.
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| Here education found new forage. That the power was wasted, the
art indiflerent, the economic failure complete, added just so
much to the interest. The chaos of education approached a dream.
One asked one's self whether this extravagance reflected the past
or imaged the future; whether it was a creation of the old
American or a promise of the new one. No prophet could be
believed, but a pilgrim of power, without constituency to
flatter, might allow himself to hope. The prospect from the
Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see almost an adequate
motive for power; almost a scheme for progress. In another
half-century, the people of the central valleys should have
hundreds of millions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they
could throw away tens; and by that time they might know what they
wanted. Possibly they might even have learned how to reach it.
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| This was an optimist's hope, shared by few except pilgrims of
World's Fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude, for, east of
the Mississippi, the St. Louis Exposition met a deliberate
conspiracy of silence, discouraging, beyond measure, to an
optimistic dream of future strength in American expression. The
party got back to Washington on May 24, and before sailing for
Europe, Adams went over, one warm evening, to bid good-bye on the
garden-porch of the White House. He found himself the first
person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the Exposition for its
beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last.
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| He left St. Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found
himself again in the town of Coutances, where the people of
Normandy had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which
architects still admired and tourists visited, for it was thought
singularly expressive of force as well as of grace in the Virgin.
On this Sunday, the Norman world was celebrating a pretty
church-feast -- the Fete Dieu -- and the streets were filled with
altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the
pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring handiwork of
nature; the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene was
graceful. The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition on
Sunday, or any other day, even to American senators who had shut
the St. Louis Exposition to her -- or for her; and a historical
tramp would gladly have offered a candle, or even a candle-stick
in her honor, if she would have taught him her relation with the
deity of the Senators. The power of the Virgin had been plainly
One, embracing all human activity; while the power of the Senate,
or its deity, seemed -- might one say -- to be more or less
ashamed of man and his work. The matter had no great interest as
far as it concerned the somewhat obscure mental processes of
Senators who could probably have given no clearer idea than
priests of the deity they supposed themselves to honor -- if that
was indeed their purpose; but it interested a student of force,
curious to measure its manifestations. Apparently the Virgin --
or her Son -- had no longer the force to build expositions that
one cared to visit, but had the force to close them. The force
was still real, serious, and, at St. Louis, had been anxiously
measured in actual money-value.
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| That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate
Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to
buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this
was the form of force which Adams most abominated. He had set
aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but
as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered and
not easily reached. The automobile alone could unite them in any
reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile,
for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no
relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral,
the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and
controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the
seeker of history. In his mind the problem offered itself as to
Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew it, in
his own case, to be a formula as precise as s = gt^2/2, if he
could but experimentally prove it. Of the attraction he needed no
proof on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more
than sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others
than himself. For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who
led the automobile and its owner where she would, to her
wonderful palaces and chateaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and
thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of others, kindly
receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as though
she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed.
He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of
his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could
dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the
formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to
her charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental
and physical energy of creation which had built up these World's
Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St.
Louis pale.
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| "Both were faiths and both are gone," said Matthew Arnold of
the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was
to ask where they had gone. The Virgin had not even altogether
gone; her fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had
pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations
of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of
quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less
admit her annihilation as energy.
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| So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had
found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her
lovers. Her own age had no time-measure. For years past, incited
by John La Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the
study of her glass at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the
automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that
of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to
another without break. The centuries dropped like autumn leaves
in one's road, and one was not fined for running over them too
fast. When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on,
and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin's
glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran
riot in sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had
flooded France, broke into Shelley's light dissolved in
star-showers thrown, which had left every remote village strewn
with fragments that flashed like jewels, and were tossed into
hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness. One dared not pass a
parish church in Champagne or Touraine without stopping to look
for its window of fragments, where one's glass discovered the
Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a fragmentary
donkey, with a Cupid playing into its long ears from the
balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemish
leibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all
invoked in prayer by remnants of the donors and their children
that might have been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors
as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and with
feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they
had paid for and lost. France abounds in sixteenth-century glass.
Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within
fifty miles contains scores of churches where the student may
still imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling before
the Virgin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith,
crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical
sins, weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education,
and still desperately hoping to understand.
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| He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century
had a value of its own, as though the ONE had become several, and
Unity had counted more than Three, though the Multiple still
showed modest numbers. The glass had gone back to the Roman
Empire and forward to the American continent; it betrayed
sympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still
supreme. At Beauvais in the Church of St. Stephen was a superb
tree of Jesse, famous as the work of Engrand le Prince, about
1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the fourteen ancestors of
the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the Kings of France,
among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly more edifying
than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine
purity. Compared with the still more famous Tree of Jesse at
Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must one declare that
Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction?
Complexity, Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it might
suggest, but what step towards perfection?
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| One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was
wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate
conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelligent
seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two men
looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window. Approaching, he read
that M. de Plehve had been assassinated at St. Petersburg. The
mad mixture of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodrome and the
Renaissance, drove him for refuge into the fascinating Church of
St. Pantaleon near by. Martyrs, murderers, Caesars, saints and
assassins -- half in glass and half in telegram; chaos of time,
place, morals, forces and motive -- gave him vertigo. Had one sat
all one's life on the steps of Ara Coeli for this? Was
assassination forever to be the last word of Progress? No one in
the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself felt none; the
charming Church with its delightful windows, in its exquisite
absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of celestial
peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of
explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist had come
to his own, but which was he -- the murderer or the murdered ?
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| The Virgin herself never looked so winning -- so One -- as in
this scandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she
existed, if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier
than when she was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity
tortured history. The effort for Unity could not be a partial
success; even alternating Unity resolved itself into meaningless
motion at last. To the tired student, the idea that he must give
it up seemed sheer senility. As long as he could whisper, he
would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator
with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing
except that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled
triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something
else. Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if
only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself
somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if
the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not,
education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.
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| The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old
formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after
all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no
absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the
thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible
orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the
observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly
called Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education,
one sought a common factor for certain definite historical
fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were
given the right to state it in his own terms.
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| Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of
the centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down
as though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own
needs the values of a Dynamic Theory of History.
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