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