DARWINISM (1867-1868)
POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet
for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in
Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly
long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The geological
champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate
at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave
said of Tennyson, that the first time he came to town, Adams should be
asked to meet him, but neither of them ever came to town, or ever cared
to meet a young American, and one could not go to them because they
were known to dislike intrusion. The only Americans who were not
allowed to intrude were the half-dozen in the Legation. Adams was
content to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his
"Voyage of the Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a
predestined follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow
Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in those
days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English way,
building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow foundations
as to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous. The atomic
theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanical
theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin's Law
of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man had to take on
trust. Neither he nor any one else knew enough to verify them; in his
ignorance of mathematics, he was particularly helpless; but this never
stood in his way. The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere--to
some great generalization which would finish one's clamor to be
educated. That a beginner should understand them all, or believe them
all, no one could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist
because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief, and
one must know something in order to contradict even such triflers as
Tyndall and Huxley.
By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow
trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he
tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best thing; he
became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He was ready to
become anything but quiet. As though the world had not been enough
upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more. He had his wish,
but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them.
He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology;
a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were history.
Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for vestiges of
Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges of Natural Selection, and
Adams followed him, although he cared nothing about Selection, unless
perhaps for the indirect amusement of upsetting curates. He felt, like
nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt no
more concern in Natural than in unnatural Selection, though he seized
with greediness the new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir
Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking
the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new
edition of his "Principles," then the highest text-book of geology; but
here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature. Natural Selection led back
to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity. This was a
vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every
one--except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for
religion; a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
Such a working system for the universe suited a young man who had just
helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million
lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who
objected to it; the idea was only too seductive in its perfection; it
had the charm of art. Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of
philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back
into it--to reach God a posteriori--rather than start from it, like
Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best
way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived.
Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither and
thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the
strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and
another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the
primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady,
uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one
day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his
"Principles" properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothing
simpler than to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles
would tell him what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the
universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir
Charles's ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after
half an hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of
American geologists about the principles of their profession. This was
getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.
The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt
by Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their
account. He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but
himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell, asked him
to explain for Americans his last edition of the "Principia," Adams
would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately the mere reading such
works for amusement is quite a different matter from studying them for
criticism. Ignorance must always begin at the beginning. Adams must
inevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason
why the apple fell to the ground. He did not know enough to be
satisfied with the fact. The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what
was Gravitation? and he would have been thrown quite off his base if
Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know.
At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial Theory
or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial epoch
looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world. If the
glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe? To him the two or
three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested or borrowed to explain
glaciation were proof of nothing, and were quite unsolid as support for
so immense a superstructure as geological uniformity. If one were at
liberty to be as lax in science as in theology, and to assume unity
from the start, one might better say so, as the Church did, and not
invite attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man,
altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir
Isaac Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views, which he
thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs. Sir Charles himself
seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in vain. At last he
resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of inserting a sentence
in the text, intended to provoke correction. "The introduction [by
Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent seemed at first sight
inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument, obliging him to allow that
causes had in fact existed on the earth capable of producing more
violent geological changes than would be possible in our own day." The
hint produced no effect. Sir Charles said not a word; he let the
paragraph stand; and Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian
was strict or lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.
Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the glacial
epoch remained a misty region in the young man's Darwinism. Had it been
the only one, he would not have fretted about it; but uniformity often
worked queerly and sometimes did not work as Natural Selection at all.
Finding himself at a loss for some single figure to illustrate the Law
of Natural Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of
uniformity on record. Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him that
certain forms, like Terebratula, appeared to be identical from the
beginning to the end of geological time. Since this was altogether too
much uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up the
attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the
end--himself. Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his
purpose, he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate.
Infinitely to his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first
vertebrate was a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all
fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under
Adams's own favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.
By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire
familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he
loved best. Like Catherine Olney in "Northanger Abbey," he yearned for
nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey,
unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior's House, and both
these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions or without, he never
tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all the
historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and
Uriconium; or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins,
all was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roman
Campagna; but perhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge on a summer
afternoon and look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales. The
peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with absence of
evolution; it was better marked in Egypt: it was felt wherever
time-sequences became interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As
one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer
haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium,
nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the railroad;
Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildwas were far
superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa, or the
monks of Buildwas, had they approached where he lay in the grass, would
have taken him only for another and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They
would have seen little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless
it were the steam of a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of
time as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past,
measuring time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of
wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of all
was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's earliest
ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according
to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose
kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria. Life
began and ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian,
without vertebrates or any other organism except a few shell-fish. On
the further verge of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which
every trace of organic existence had been erased.
That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American,
seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate parentage as
modern as though just caught in the Severn below, astonished him as
much as though he had found Darwin himself. In the scale of evolution,
one vertebrate was as good as another. For anything he, or any one
else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution out of a
thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis. To an American in search of
a father, it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through
lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether
another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced
descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This
matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La
Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals,
stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had
doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:--
"Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme,
Que scelerat pour scelerat,
Il vaut mieux etre un loup qu'un homme."
It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the
problem of Pteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete proof
of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis, and
that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate had
been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites
whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the
shores of Quincy Bay.
That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them
should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor
could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden
back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature
he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of
tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Siluria, he understood, Sir
Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Limulus, which helped
nothing. Neither in the Limulus nor in the Terebratula, nor in the
Cestracion Philippi, any more than in the Pteraspis, could one
conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the choice mattered little.
Cousinship had limits but no one knew enough to fix them. When the
vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.
Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of
ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow
shale, as complete as Adams himself--in some respects more so--at the
top of the column of organic evolution: and geology offered no sort of
proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might,
Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure
inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one found a
watch, one inferred a maker. He could detect no more evolution in life
since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the
Abbey. All he could prove was change. Coal-power alone asserted
evolution--of power--and only by violence could be forced to assert
selection of type.
All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir
Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles
labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them
till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams gladly
studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the
day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove
only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform;
and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians--except
Darwin--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 from 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.
Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass
close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass--or
whatever there was to nibble--in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he
seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of
fishes. He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he
determined to stop it. Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had
any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be
many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of
ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived
and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which
had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to
discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth
was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved
true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for
fun.
From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
as criminal--worse than crime--sacrilege! Society punished it
ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father, looked
on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy him
nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn from
Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on enterprises
great or small. He had no notion of letting the currents of his action
be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him, the current of his
time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology
under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards;
on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of
every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was,
as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their
practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as
though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the
surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young
men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law
should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in
the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy
in order; and he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though
he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million
more lives.
As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he could
not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying it. He,
at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith. The Church
was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded
deeply in interest and law. This was the result of five or six years in
England; a result so British as to be almost the equivalent of an
Oxford degree.
Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who
left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned resolutely to
business, and attacked the burning question of specie payments. His
principles assured him that the honest way to resume payments was to
restrict currency. He thought he might win a name among financiers and
statesmen at home by showing how this task had been done by England,
after the classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the
study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a
morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his
confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British
financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that
the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the
Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were the remedies.
The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis to his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution was
not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever the
last hope of employment in State Street. Six months of patient labor
would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his whole
scheme of making himself a position as a practical man-of-business. If
he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that
moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had
nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone?
Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge
impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or
forgave.
With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821, and,
doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for
choice. He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus
thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to crush the author;
but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic--when successful--than
his ignorance. The editor accepted both.
When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with as
much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The letter
gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the freedom of
the press. These articles, following those on Pocahontas and Lyell,
enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review.
Precisely what this rank was worth, no one could say; but, for fifty
years the North American Review had been the stage coach which carried
literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved. Few
writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development, but for
such as thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An article
was a small volume which required at least three months' work, and was
paid, at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even in England or
France could write a good thirty-page article, and practically no one
in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in search of
items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact, which
was a sort of wild game--a bluefish or a teal--worth anywhere from
fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaper writers had their eye on
quarterly pickings. The circulation of the Review had never exceeded
three or four hundred copies, and the Review had never paid its
reasonable expenses. Yet it stood at the head of American literary
periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it
reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was an
organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in
some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily newspaper.
With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself
what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his
helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No one
could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a
part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might perhaps
have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers or
William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one would have picked out
William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Boston
was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry
Higginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard;
Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start.
Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the
century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could
show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor.
The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks. Had Adams
foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser,
and could have chosen no better path.
Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the
pleasantest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the
Silurian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord
Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background
the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly, and
the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing
that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 was nearly
complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himself
almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before
he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary
could afford to be happy. His old education was finished; his new one
was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end
of a very long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with another
to follow, and a summer sea between.
He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back
in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season he wandered
on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome of the
middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as had become
with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of
Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its mediaeval
society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itself as seriously
as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years of accidental
education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868
than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more
intelligible to him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no
better when he got back to London and went through his last season.
London had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his
habits, and even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like an Englishman,
and going into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a straw.
He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments of his
friends. When at last he found himself back again at Liverpool, his
heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved mechanically, unstrung,
but he had no more acquired education than when he first trod the steps
of the Adelphi Hotel in November, 1858. He could see only one great
change, and this was wholly in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed
his imagination; even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy
interest; he felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the
British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people
who frequented their country houses; he had become English to the point
of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices
against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of American
youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes. As
far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education,
but in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years
in London.