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