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