Mr. Brooks Adams apologizes for the inadequacy of his introduction to his brother's philosophical remains on the ground that the publishers hurried him, saying that if he did not get the book out within the year it would have lost its interest. Of course the readers who take up The Education of Henry Adams because it is the sensation of the hour will soon drop away, perhaps have already done so; but interest in the Adamses, so long quiescent, so piquantly reawakened at the end of the fourth eminent generation, is likely to hold more serious readers for some time to come. Henry Adams has thrown out challenges which the reviewer cannot lightly answer nor easily ignore. What shall be done with that profoundly pessimistic theory of the "degradation of energy'—a degradation alleged to be discoverable in the universe, in democracy, and even in that incorruptible stronghold of pure virtue, the Adams family? Every one who has sat blithely down to read The Education, much more to review it, must have discovered that it is only the last or the latest chapter of a "continued story." It is a lure leading into a vast literary edifice, built by successive generations, which one must at least casually explore before one can conceive what was the heritage of Henry Adams, or can guess whether the family's energy suffered degradation when it produced him.
One who wishes to measure the decline from the source must begin with The Works of John Adams in ten volumes, edited by his grandson Charles Francis Adams I, and including a diary so fascinating and so important that one marvels that American students of letters are not occasionally sent to it rather than to Pepys or Evelyn. One should follow this up with the charming letters of John's wife, Abigail, also edited by Charles Francis I, in 1841—a classic which would be in the American Everyman if our publishers fostered American as carefully as they foster English traditions. For John Quincy Adams, we have his own Memoirs in twelve volumes, being portions of that famous diary of which he said: "There has perhaps not been another individual of the human race whose daily existence from early childhood to fourscore years has been noted down with his own hand so minutely as mine;" also a separate volume called Life in a New England Town, being his diary while a student in the office of Theophilus Parsons at Newburyport. One may perhaps pass Charles Francis I with his life by Charles Francis II. Then one descends to the fourth generation, and reads the Autobiography of Charles Francis II, published in 1916, a notable book with interest not at all dependent upon reflected glory. Of Brooks Adams one must read at least The Emancipation of Massachusetts and the introduction to The Degradation of Democratic Dogma, and then one is tantalized on into The Law of Civilization and Decay, America's Economic Supremacy, and The Theory of Social Revolutions. Finally one approaches Henry's Education not quite unprepared and not over-looking the fact that, besides biographies of Gallatin and Randolph, he wrote what has been called "incomparably the best" history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, in nine volumes distinguished by lucid impartiality, and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, an interpretation of the twelfth century as impressive in height and span as the great cathedral which Adams takes as the symbol of his thought.
Historians, of course, are familiar with all these paths. I should like, however, to commend them a little to gentler and less learned readers. Taken not as material for history but as the story of four generations of great personalities, living always near the center of American life, the Adams annals surpass anything we have produced in fiction. One may plunge into them as into the Comédie Humaine of Balzac or Zola's Rougon-Macquart series and happily lose contact with the world, which, if we may believe Brooks Adams, ultimus Romanorum, is going so fatally to the dogs. Perhaps an Adams of the present day must come forth from the study of his heredity, environment, and education with a conviction that he is an automaton, moved forward by the convergence of "lines of force," and that he is a poorer automaton than his grandfather. But for my part, I have emerged from these narratives much braced by contact with the stout, proud, purposeful Adams will, and with an impression that their latest pessimistic theories are poorly supported by their facts.
The Adams pessimism has a certain tonic quality due to its origin in the Adams sense for standards. The three Adonises, Charles Francis, Brooks, and Henry, have humiliated themselves all their lives by walking back and forth before the portraits of their statesmen ancestors and measuring their own altitude against that of "the friends of Washington." An Adams should always be in the grand style. So history presents them to the young imagination: Plutarchan heroes, august republicans, ever engaged in some public act or gesture such as Benjamin West liked to spread on his canvases—drafting the Declaration of Independence, presenting credentials to George III, signing the Monroe doctrine, fulminating in Congress against the annexation of Texas, or penning the famous dispatch to Lord Russell: "It would be superfluous to point out to your lordship that this is war." In a nation which has endured for a hundred and fifty years, it ought not to be easy to equal the elevation of character, or to attain the heights of achievement reached by the most eminent men. There should be in every old national gallery certain figures unassailably great to rebuke the natural insolence of younger generations and silently to remind a young man that he must have a strong heart and almost wear it out before he can hope to deserve what these worthies have made the proudest of rewards, the thanks and the remembrance of the Republic.
For an Adams, who needs a bit of humility, it no doubt is wholesome to dwell on the superiority of his forefathers; but for the average man who needs a bit of encouragement, it is equally wholesome to reflect that John Adams represents a distinct "variation" of species. The family had been in America a hundred years before the grand style began to develop. In the words of Charles Francis I, "Three long successive generations and more than a century of time passed away, during which Gray's elegy in the country churchyard relates the whole substance of their history." If we can only understand the processes by which John was transformed from a small farmer's son to President of the United States, the evolution of the rest of the family will be as easy to follow as the transmission of wealth. Now, John's emergence is singularly devoid of miraculous aspects, and it is therefore of practical interest to the democrat.
John abandoned the pitchfork and varied his species by taking two steps which in those days were calculated to put him in the governing class. He went to Harvard—a course which may still be imitated, but which in 1755, when the total population of the colonies only equalled that of one of our great cities, set a man far more distinctly in a class by himself than it does today, and marked him for a professional career. Second, after an insignificant interval of school teaching, he studied law in the office of Rufus Putnam, and thus entered a still smaller class, carefully restricted by limitation of the number of apprentices who could be taken in any office.
At the same time he began keeping a diary, a habit which it is now the custom to ridicule. What strikes one about John's diary in his years of adolescence is that he uses it as an instrument for marking his intellectual progress and getting himself in hand, neither of which is a morbid activity. He notes that he is of an amorous temperament and that his thoughts are liable to be "called off from law by a girl, a pipe, a poem, a love-letter, a Spectator, a play, etc., etc." But studia in mores abeunt; and year after year he is digging away tenaciously and purposefully at studies which communicate a masculine vigor to the mind; and he is reading, with instant application to his own future, authors that are still capable of putting a flame of ambition in a young man's vitals.
The breadth and humanity of the old-fashioned program of reading for the bar may be suggested by one of his entries at the age of twenty-three:
Labor to get distinct ideas of law, right, wrong, justice, equity; search for them in your own mind, in Roman, Grecian, French, English treatises of natural, civil, common, statute law; aim at an exact knowledge of the nature, end, and means of government; compare the different forms of it with each other, and each of them with their effects on public and private happiness. Study Seneca, Cicero, and all other good moral writers; study Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, Vinnius, etc., and all other good civil writers.
He enjoins it upon himself to observe the arts of popularity in the tavern, town-meeting, the training field, and the meeting-house, though it must be added that none of his line mastered these arts. He frequents the courts, converses with successful men, records a public-spirited act of Franklin's, and surmises after an hour's talk at Mayor Gardener's that "the design of Christianity was not to make men good riddle-solvers or good mystery-mongers but good men, good magistrates." After a bit of dawdling, he tells himself that "twenty-five years of the animal life is a great proportion to be spent to so little purpose." He vows to read twelve hours a day. He cries to himself: "Let love and vanity be extinguished, and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn. Let little objects be neglected and forgot, and great ones engross, arouse, and exalt my soul." Such temper issued from that diet of lion's marrow, that energetic digestion of law and classical literature!
The only remarkable aspect of the variation effected in this generation was that such a man as John Adams should have found such a wife as Abigail Smith, a woman descended from the religious aristocrats of New England, and her husband's equal in heart and mind. Her descendants of the present day would say that predetermined lines of force—theological and legal—converged here to strengthen the social position of John and to insure the production of John Quincy; but that is not the way most men think of their wooing. Abigail had no formal schooling; yet, as "female" education went in those days, it mattered little. She was obviously the "product" of that family culture and social discipline which, at their best, render formal schooling almost superfluous. She had the gaiety of good breeding, the effusion of quick emotions, and that fundamental firmness of character which are developed by a consciousness that one was born in the right class. From books, from table-talk, from the men and women who frequented her home, not least from her lover, she had derived the views of the classical mid-eighteenth century, with just a premonitory flush of romantic enthusiasm; she had become familiar with public affairs; she had acquired the tone and carriage, she had breathed in the great spirit, of such a woman as Cato would have a Roman wife and mother.
Emerson cherished the thought of writing an American Plutarch. In such a book we should have a picture of Abigail managing her husband's estate in Braintree while he is at the Congress in Philadelphia—through pestilence, siege, battles, and famineprices not venturing to ask a word of his return, lest she perturb a mind occupied with public business. We should have her reply at a later period to one who asked whether she would have consented to her husband's going to France, had she known that he was to be absent so long:
I recollected myself a moment, and then spoke the real dictates of my heart. "If I had known, sir, that Mr. Adams could have effected what he has done, I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured, painful as it has been, but I would not have opposed it, even though three years should be added to the number (which Heaven avert). I find a pleasure in being able to sacrifice my selfish passions to the general good and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family but as the small dust of the scale when compared with the great community.
We should see her called from her farm to be the first American lady at the English Court. We should remark that she finds the best manners in England in the home of the Bishop of St. Asaph, old friend of her adored Franklin, where, by the way, she meets those dangerous English radicals Priestley and Price. And with the warmth of fond native prejudice, we should adore her for writing home:
Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous; but keep this to yourself, or I shall be thought more than half deficient in understanding and taste.
In the jargon of Brooks and Henry Adams, as I have remarked, irresistible "lines of force" converge for the education of the second generation. More humanly speaking, the ambition of John, the tenderness and pride of Abigail, unite above the cradle of John Quincy, and most intelligently conspire to give him what he later was to recognize as "an unparalleled education." "It should be your care and mine," John writes to his wife, "to elevate the minds of our children, and exalt their courage, to accelerate and animate their industry and activity." It is the fashion nowadays to assert, against the evidence of history, that great men in their critical hours are unconscious of their greatness; but these Adamses assuredly knew what they were about. With the fullest recognition that her boy's father and his friends are living classics, Abigail writes:
Glory, my son, in a country which has given birth to characters, both in the civil and military departments, which may vie with the wisdom and valor of antiquity. As an immediate descendant of one of these characters, may you be led to that disinterested patriotism and that noble love of country which will teach you to despise wealth, pomp, and equipage as mere external advantages, which cannot add to the internal excellence of your mind, or compensate for the want of integrity and virtue.
Of course John Quincy was to use the "external advantages" which his mother a little hastily urged him to despise. By working twelve hours a day at the law, John Adams had raised the family from the ground up to a point at which he could give to the educational processes of his son a tremendous expansion and acceleration. At an age when John had been helping his father on the farm, from eleven to fourteen, John Quincy, son of the peace commissioner, was studying in Paris or Leyden, or travelling in Russia as private secretary to the American Envoy. He acquired history, diplomacy, geography as he acquired his French—by what we call in the case of the last, "the natural method." It cannot be too much emphasized that in the second, third, and fourth generations the family and its connections were in position to provide a liberal education without resort to a university. Before John Quincy went to Harvard he had assisted in negotiating the treaty of peace between his country and Great Britain. The whole matter of external advantages may be summed up in a picture of the boy, at the age of eleven, returning from France in a ship with the French Ambassador, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and his secretary M. Marbois, the three lying side by side on their cots and thus portrayed by the boy's proud father:
The Ambassador reading out loud, in Blackstone's Discourse at his entrance on his Professorship of the Common Law at the University, and my son correcting the pronunciation of every word and syllable and letter. The Ambassador said he was astonished at my son's knowledge; that he was a master of his own tongue, like a professor. M. Marbois said, Your son teaches us more than you; he has point de graces, point d'éloges.
Charles Francis II, who knew his grandfather only in his old age, says that he was not of a "holiday temperament;" but the diary of John Quincy Adams's early life in Newburyport shows a fairly festive young Puritan, tempted, like his father before him, to frequent truancies from the law, reading Tom Jones and Rousseau's Confessions, shooting, playing the flute, visiting, frequently dancing till three, occasionally drinking till dawn, and regretting it for three days afterward. His social position was secure, his experience and attainments already notable, his career marked out, the reflected glamour of paternal glory gratifying; perhaps he asked himself why he should not rest on his oars while his contemporaries were catching up. Such considerations may occur to an Adams, but they do not remain with him. His ambition widens with his culture. He begins on the verge of manhood to pant for distinction, bids farewell to the revellers, girds up his loins, and strikes into his pace.
John Quincy Adams had found his stride when he wrote to his father from London, December 29, 1795:
When I am clearly convinced that my duty commands me to act, if the love of ease, or the love of life, or the love of fame itself, dear as it is, could arrest my hand, or give me a moment's hesitation in the choice, I should certainly be fit for no situation of public trust whatever. . . . So much for the principle. But I may go a little further. The struggle against a popular clamor is not without its charms in my mind.
In the next year, following the example of John Wesley, he began rising at four o'clock; and so eager was his mind, so tireless his industry, so completely had he taken himself in hand, that he rose not later than four-thirty for the next fifty years—fifty years spent almost without interruption in public service, fighting the Jacksonian democrats, fighting for internal improvements, fighting the extension of slavery, fighting for free speech, till he sank in harness in his eighty-first year on the floor of the House of Representatives.
His training in law and diplomacy had fitted him for statesmanship, and as a statesman chiefly he lives. But Brooks Adams makes much of his philosophical temper and of his talent for scientific investigation. For our purposes it is important also to note that he had a marked taste for literature, as the vast memoirs bear witness. In his old age he spoke of the "ecstasy of delight" with which he had heard a choir singing his version of the 65th Psalm as surpassing all the pleasure he had received in the whole course of his life from the praise of mortal men. His literary and his political aspirations were intimately associated. He had hoped that his diary would rank next to the Holy Scriptures as the record of one who "by the irresistible power of genius and the irrepressible energy of will and the favor of Almighty God" had "banished war and slavery from the face of the earth forever."
Charles Francis Adams I, perhaps not the most ambitious of John Quincy's children, was the only one that survived him; he must therefore be our representative of the third generation. We may, however, pass lightly over him, because, though an eminent, sturdy, and capable man, he repeats in general the formative processes and the careers of his predecessors without any singular distinction or deviation from type. His richness of educational opportunity may be summarized by saying that he learned French at St. Petersburg, where his father was minister, spent several years at a school in England, passed through the Boston Latin School and Harvard, and studied law and observed public men from the White House in the administration of his father and in the palmy days of Jackson, Clay, and Webster. Possibly if the father had retired after his defeat for reëlection in 1828, Charles Francis might have felt more distinctly called to advance the Adams banner; but the almost immediate return of the ex-president, plunging into his long Congressional career, preëmpted the field. Charles went to Boston, engaged in business, served for several years in the legislature, was elected to Congress in 1859, and crowned his achievements in the period of the Civil War by staunchly and successfully representing the Union in his ministry to Great Britain.
Coming now to the representatives of the fourth generation, who made their careers after the Civil War, we confront once more the three Adonises who more or less darkly despair of the Republic and of the future of the Adams line—Henry, Brooks, and Charles Francis II. All three were bred in the traditions of the great family, inherited its culture and social advantages, became conscious of an obligation to distinguish themselves, strove to keep pace with the new nation which the war had created, and all three, rendering an account of their adventures, intimate a degree of failure and rail at their education as inadequately adapting them to their circumstances. As a matter of fact they did fall short of the glory of their ancestors in that no one of them held public office of first-rate national importance. But, on the other hand, none of them really competed with his illustrious predecessors. Each of them developed marked variations from the ante-bellum type, in one case so marked as to constitute a new species. If the ancestral energy is degraded, it is none the less abundantly present in them all.
Charles Francis II, the least highly individualized of the trio, was the one who most conspicuously fell into the stride of the new industrial, expansive America. At his graduation from Harvard in 1856 he had discovered no remarkable aptitude—for which he blames his teachers—and so gravitated into a law office. At the outbreak of the war, it slowly occurred to him to enlist; but, once in, he enjoyed the hard athletic life, and developed a drillmaster's pride in his company and in his regiment, at the head of which he rode into burning Richmond. His military duties disclosed to him his talent for organization, and also the disquieting fact that famous fighters and great organizers were frequently beneath his standard for gentlemen; Grant, for example, "was a man of coarse fibre, and did not impress with a sense of character."
But the war had toughened his own fibre and had opened his eyes to new careers for talents. When it was over, he turned to the study of railroads as the biggest enterprise of the new era, wrote his Chapters of Erie, became a member of the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners, which was created largely through his instrumentality, and crowned his professional career with the presidency of the Union Pacific. He was perhaps the first Adams who looked west with any special interest. His flash of genius was divining the future importance of Kansas City. The business success on which he plumes himself is his organization of the Kansas City Stock Yards Company, which, under his forty-year headship, increased its capitalization from $100,000 to over ten millions, and earned annually above $1,200,000. He does not blush to declare that he also organized in Kansas City another enterprise which made in one year "twelve dividends of ten per cent each."
The big business men, however, like the big generals, disappointed him socially: "Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next." Having made, as the vulgar say, his "pile," this well-bred, energetic Massachusetts business man withdrew from the ungentlemanly world of business, moved from Quincy, the home of his ancestors, to Lincoln, because the former residence had become too "suburban," and devoted his leisure to writing his memoirs, criticizing Harvard, and composing communications to the Massachusetts Historical Society. At the age of fifty-five he burned his diary, full till then with the expectation that he might accomplish something notable; and in his Autobiography, with the tang of the new Adams humility, he declares: "I now humbly thank fortune that I have almost got through life without making a conspicuous ass of myself."
Brooks Adams also set out as a lawyer, but he seems to have retired much earlier into authorship. His writing is less perspicuous and well-ordered than that of his brother Charles; but that is partly because he has more ideas and more difficult ones. Brooks is a restless-minded lawyer of a not unfamiliar type, who turns here and there for something "craggy" upon which to wreak his excess of mental energy; and so he becomes amateur-historian, amateur-economist, amateur-philosopher. The antiquarianism of historical societies is a bit too tame for his temper. Like his brother Henry, and indeed in collaboration with him, he seeks a law connecting phenomena, and in search of it he ransacks history. He imagines and declares that he has made his mind passive to the lessons of facts and that his results are scientific; but the truth is that he is a dogmatic materialist, an infatuated mechanist, who, when he has formulated an hypothesis, sees nothing between earth and heaven and the first Adam and the last Adams but the proof of it.
Like his grandfather, he finds a certain charm in an unpopular position. Sitting in the neighborhood of Plymouth Rock, he discovers that the scutcheon of his Puritan forefathers blushes with the blood of Quakers and Anabaptists; and in his Emancipation of Massachusetts, Puritan as he is, he remorselessly prosecutes them as selfish and bloodthirsty hypocrites. Looking further into history, he concludes that the same indictment can be brought against all religious societies and organizations from the time of Moses down; for the facts constrain him to believe that the two master passions of man are Fear and Greed. If he refrains from censure, it is because he holds that mental as well as physical phenomena are determined as fatally as the earth moves round the sun. The examination of long periods of history impresses him with "the exceedingly small part played by conscious thought in moulding the fates of men." He applies the doctrine of manifest destiny in the most fatalistic sense to the Philippine Islands and to capitalistic society, which, however, seems to him on the point of disintegration into a condition from which it can only be revivified by an "infusion of barbarian blood."
Brooks attributes many of his views to Henry and undertakes to interpret him; but temperamentally he is not qualified to understand him. He admits, indeed, that there were crypts in his brother which he had never entered. Chief of these was the unfathomable crypt of his skepticism. By contact with Mill, Comte, Darwin, Spencer, all the Adamses of the fourth generation had been emancipated from their attenuated hereditary belief in a beneficent overruling Providence. But Charles Francis II and Brooks recommitted themselves without reservation to the overweening posivitism of mid-century "scientific" philosophy. Henry alone refuses to surrender. A wily, experienced wrestler, returning again and again to grapple with the Time-Spirit, at the end of each bout he eludes the adversary; and at the moment one expects to see him thrown, suddenly he has vanished, he has fled through centuries falling about him like autumn leaves, and from somewhere in the Middle Ages, near some old shrine of the Virgin, one hears the sound of mocking laughter. It is the free spirit, eternally seeking.
Henry was, I think, a great man and the only great Adams of his generation. All the other Adamses had been men of action tinctured with letters. Henry alone definitely renounced action and turned the full current of the ancestral energy to letters. By so doing he established a new standard of achievement for the Adams line; and in consequence, of course, for the rest of us. Up to the time of the Civil War there had been for them but one field of glory, the political arena, and but one standard of achievement, national administration. After the war Charles Francis II tried to be great in "big business," but in the Adams sense "failed" because his culture was of no use there. Brooks tried for greatness in naturalistic philosophy, but found that his creed ignobly reduced all heroes to automata. But Henry, without otherwise committing himself, sought to comprehend and to represent his world, and he achieved greatness. Like yet unlike his ancestors who were painted by Copley and Stuart, he is in the grand style.
The Education of Henry Adams marks with precision the hour when its author became conscious of his variation. It was in England, towards the close of the war, where as secretary to his father he had exhausted all the excitements of the diplomatic "game," and London society had begun to pall, and loitering in Italy had ceased to charm, yet he was collecting bric-à-brac and sketches by the old masters and becoming attached to his habits and his hansom cabs, and was in a fair way to become one of those dilettantish, blasé young Americans of the period, whom Henry James has preserved like pressed flowers for posterity. It was after Sir Charles Lyell and the evolutionists had set him off on a new quest for a "father"—it mattered not, he said, "whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet." It was in that summer hour, characteristically marked by him with its picturesque accessories, when he had wandered to Wenlock Edge in Shropshire, and, throwing himself on the grass where he could look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales, thus meditated on the new theory:
Natural selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he should surely drop off Darwinism like a monkey from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change. . . . Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.
From that moment, literature was the one career for Henry, and all his overtures were failures till he discovered it. He returned to America, indeed, with the Emersonian resolution that "the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might." He went to Washington, as a member of the governing class should do, and while waiting for an opportunity to serve the incoming administration of Grant, offered himself on long argumentative walks as the anvil for Sumner's hammer. The announcement of Grant's cabinet, however, as he explains the matter, closed for him the door of political opportunity. A revolution had taken place which had made him appear "an estray of the fifties, a belated reveller, a scholar-gipsy." Coal, iron, and steam had supplanted agriculture, handwork, and learning. "His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yaccob or Ysaac—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war." And so Henry drifted into his antiquarian professorship at Harvard, cut loose from that and wrote his great history of Jefferson and Madison, and only returned to Washington to watch the spectacle, and to sit in his windows with John Hay, laughing at Presidents, and mocking the runner's heat.
Where was the bold energy of the first and second Adams that broke down barred doors of opportunity and found a "charm" in contending against a powerful opposition? Transmuted by the accumulated culture of the Adams family education—not wasted. The mockery and the pervasive irony, so seductive in The Education, spring from no sense of essentially depleted energy in the author; on the contrary, they have their origin in a really exuberant sense of spiritual superiority. Adams after Adams has seen himself outshone, in the popular estimate, by vulgar "democratical" men, by rising men of the "people," whom he has half or wholly despised—by Franklin, by Paine, by Jefferson, by Jackson, by Lincoln, by Grant. But when John Quincy was defeated by Jackson, though he thought God had abandoned America, he felt himself still high priest. And though Henry thought the progress of evolution from Washington to Grant sufficient to upset Darwin, and though he regarded Grant as a man who should have lived in a cave and worn skins, he reinstated Darwin in the next breath; for Henry Adams would not have changed places with Washington; he regarded Washington himself as but a cave man in comparison with Henry Adams!
In revulsion from a world bent on making twelve dividends of ten per cent in a year and spending them for it knew not what, the Adams energy in him had been diverted to the production of a human measure of civilization; to a register of the value of art and social life and manners and those other by-products of coal and iron which the Philistines of every age rate as superfluous things; to a search, finally, to an inquiry all the way from Kelvin to the Virgin of Chartres, for some principle of Unity, for some overarching splendor to illumine the gray twilight of an industrial democracy. He did not find it, but the quest was glorious.
Henry Adams was an egotist. Granted. But what an egotist! Not since Byron With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart—
not since the days of "Childe Harold" have we had so superb an egotist in literature, so splendidly in revolt, so masterly in self-portraiture, so romantically posed among the lights and shadows of history, against the ruins of time. Let us forget and forgive the unfeeling cynic who inquired, "If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" Let us remember the poet who felt the "overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn" and the "intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May." Let us fix our gaze on the Pilgrim receiving the news of the blowing up of the Maine as he watches the sun set across the Nile at Assouan:
One leant on a fragment of column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep down the débris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between civilizations was that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian. His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of thought along the great highways of exchange.
Though Henry Adams was "a Darwinian for fun," in his search for God he was as much in earnest as a man can be who sets out for a far country which he knows that he shall never reach. To him, as to his great-grandfather and his grandfather before him, the tribal Jehovah created by the ancient Semitic imagination, the competitor of Baal and Astoreth, was a mythological abomination, surviving in the minds of those early New England pedants who had instigated the hanging of witches in Salem and the persecution of Quakers and Anabaptists. His ancestors, John and Abigail and John Quincy Adams, had entered into the religious enlightenment of the eighteenth century. But to him, a son of the mid-nineteenth century, the improved God of the Deists and the Unitarians—the bland, just, and benevolent Providence of Franklin, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams—had become as obsolete and incredible as the more markedly vertebrate deity of Increase Mather's time.
Those who read Henry Adams with inadequate sense of his irony may feel that the God whose laws he attempted to discover in his quest through contemporary science is not more real than the Providence of the Deists nor less dreadful than the Jehovah of the old theologians. That all-pervading Power, blind but physically omnipotent, which attracted his mind, that Power which moves in thunder and earthquake, in the growth and decay of living forms, in the dynamo, the gun, the manof-war, that Power worshipped by Carlyle and Bismarck and Disraeli and Roosevelt and all the "strong men" of recent history—has neither feet to bring good tidings, nor bowels of compassion, nor countenance divine; and knees that have bowed at the foot of the Cross, hands that have clutched the robe of the Virgin, hearts that have cried out of their depths to a heavenly Father, turn uncomforted from Motion and Change enshrined, turn dismayed from the roaring whirlwinds of physical power as from an altar to an obscene Thing.
But Henry Adams turned away, also—and this is the mark of his greatness—murmuring disdainfully, partly to himself and partly to the age which was soon to make ten millions of its sons pass through the fire to its Moloch: "Him whom ye ignorantly worship, the same declare I unto you. Your God himself, in the lapse of ages, has suffered a degradation of energy." Henry Adams turned away from the shrine of the obscene Thing with a jest of invincible skepticism, and went on a long holiday through the Middle Ages, "wooing" the Virgin, incredulous to the end that the divine love should have been transformed and annihilated in the abysses of energy, seeking to the end for a clue to "a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder."
The bronze statue by St. Gaudens which in 1887 Henry Adams caused to be erected, without inscription, upon the grave of his wife in the Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, seems curiously to symbolize the spirit and the fruit of his own pilgrimage. The strangely haunting figure, enveloped in heavy drapery, sits on a rough-hewn block of granite against a granite wall, the great limbs in repose, the right hand supporting the face, shadowed and almost invisible. Here at sunset, after long wandering, the Pilgrim comes at last to the place where no answers are given; at the gateless wall ponders the mysteries, silent, passive, thinking without hope yet without despair: "Here restless minds and limbs of divine mold rest at last. This is the place of dust and shadow and the dispersion of all that was sweet and fair into the devouring tides of energy. This may be the end of all, forever and ever. If so, so be it."
Thus that sombre figure appears to commune with itself; but so much will is manifest even in its repose, it seems so undefeated even in defeat, that the visitor departs saying to himself: "Man is the animal that destiny cannot break."