University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXIII
SILENCE (1894–1898)

THE convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and
closed much education. While the country braced itself
up to an effort such as no one had thought within its
powers, the individual crawled as he best could, through the
wreck, and found many values of life upset. But for connecting
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to
1897, had no value in the drama of education, and might be left
out. Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890
perished in the ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been
the fortunes of Clarence King. The lesson taught whatever the
bystander chose to read in it; but to Adams it seemed singularly
full of moral, if he could but understand it. In 1871 he had thought
King's education ideal, and his personal fitness unrivalled. No
other young American approached him for the combination of
chances—physical energy, social standing, mental scope and
training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively
American and irresistibly strong. His nearest rival was Alexander
Agassiz, and, as far as their friends knew, no one else could be
classed with them in the running. The result of twenty years'
effort proved that the theory of scientific education failed where
most theory fails—for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who
kept himself, as he thought, quite outside of every possible financial
risk, had been caught in the cogs, and held for months
over the gulf of bankruptcy, saved only by the chance that the
whole class of millionaires were more or less bankrupt too, and the
banks were forced to let the mice escape with the rats; but, in
sum, education without capital could always be taken by the
throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped by the
knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered.

Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education was
the same. The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to
back it, was flagrant.

The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless
without money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure
to be frozen out. Education must fit the complex conditions of a
new society, always accelerating its movement, and its fitness
could be known only from success. One looked about for examples
of success among the educated of one's time—the men born
in the thirties, and trained to professions. Within one's immediate
acquaintance, three were typical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and
William C. Whitney; all of whom owed their free hand to marriage,
education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in 1893,
William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type.

Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print
was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the
very rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New
York might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or
sneered at them, and never showed them respect. Scarcely one
of the very rich men held any position in society by virtue of his
wealth, or could have been elected to an office, or even into a good
club. Setting aside the few, like Pierpont Morgan, whose social
position had little to do with greater or less wealth, riches were in
New York no object of envy on account of the joys they brought
in their train, and Whitney was not even one of the very rich;
yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason for it.
Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having
gratified every ambition, and swung the country almost at his
will; he had thrown away the usual objects of political ambition
like the ashes of smoked cigarettes; had turned to other amusements,
satiated every taste, gorged every appetite, won every
object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had carried
his field of activity abroad, until New York no longer knew what

most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had succeeded precisely
where Clarence King had failed.

Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal;
but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an American
education ought to be in order to count as success. Even
granting that it counted as money, its value could not be called
general. America contained scores of men worth five millions or
upwards, whose lives were no more worth living than those of
their cooks, and to whom the task of making money equivalent
to education offered more difficulties than to Adams the task of
making education equivalent to money. Social position seemed to
have value still, while education counted for nothing. A mathematician,
linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if fortunate,
might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open market.
An administrator, organizer, manager, with mediæval qualities
of energy and will, but no education beyond his special branch,
would probably be worth at least ten times as much.

Society had failed to discover what sort of education suited it
best. Wealth valued social position and classical education as
highly as either of these valued wealth, and the women still tended
to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could see he was
himself as contented as though he had been educated; while
Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory,
had failed; and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams,
had achieved phenomenal success.

Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile
use of the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and
Spanish. With these he could still make his way to any object
within his vision, and would have a decisive advantage over nine
rivals in ten. Statesman or lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest
or professor, native or foreign, he would fear none.

King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the

indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced
him to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted
into the little town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society,
which King knew well, was more amusing than any other that
one had yet discovered in the whole broad world, but made no
profession of teaching anything unless it were Cuban Spanish or
the danza; and neither on his own nor on King's account did the
visitor ask any loftier study than that of the buzzards floating on
the trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or the colors of sea
and shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran Piedra; but, as
though they were still twenty years old and revolution were as
young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid, fell
on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief.
In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were always
falling on one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant political
convulsions taught least. Since the time of Rameses, revolutions
have raised more doubts than they solved, but they have sometimes
the merit of changing one's point of view, and the Cuban
rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams to a
Democratic administration. He thought that President Cleveland
could have settled the Cuban question, without war, had he
chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the Democratic
Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and the
gold standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave
no choice between parties. The new American, whether consciously
or not, had turned his back on the nineteenth century
before he was done with it; the gold standard, the protective system,
and the laws of mass could have no other outcome, and, as
so often before, the movement, once accelerated by attempting
to impede it, had the additional, brutal consequence of crushing
equally the good and the bad that stood in its way.

The lesson was old—so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex,

among the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never
been fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more
amusing for their torpor. After passing the winter with King in
the West Indies, he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone,
and found there little to study. The Geysers were an old
story; the Snake River posed no vital statistics except in its fordings;
even the Tetons were as calm as they were lovely; while the
wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and corners, laid no traps. In
return the party treated them with affection. Never did a band
less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the roof of the continent.
Hay loved as little as Adams did, the labor of skinning and butchering
big game; he had even outgrown the sedate, middle-aged, meditative
joy of duck-shooting, and found the trout of the Yellowstone
too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself, who managed the party,
loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so much as a field-mouse;
Iddings the geologist was reduced to shooting only for the
table, and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the
simple life. Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness
had vanished; one saw no possible adventures except to break
one's neck as in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent
ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociable bear.

When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on
alone to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway
systems yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning,
and no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography
than with desperate thirst for exhausting the American
field, he set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the
Caribbean and clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least
twenty thousand miles of American land and water.

He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life—tropical
islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types.
Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque
than civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's sixtieth

year approached, the artist began to die; only a certain intense
cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensual
stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as though
art were a trotting-match. For this, one was in some degree prepared,
for the old man had been a stage-type since drama began;
but one felt some perplexity to account for failure on the opposite
or mechanical side, where nothing but cerebral action was needed.

Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic,
he plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would
find the surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest
he had ever approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited
statistics, endless columns of figures, bottomless averages
merely for the asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington
Ford supplied any material that curiosity could imagine for
filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and methods for applying the
plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be winning ground,
and one's averages projected themselves as laws into the future.
Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the attitude
of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in
their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they
talked like other men who knew less. The method did not result
in faith. Indeed, every increase of mass—of volume and velocity
—seemed to bring in new elements, and, at last, a scholar, fresh
in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious
terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came out as it
should. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up
or pull down a society. One could frame no sort of satisfactory
answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the
destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic imprecations
of Élisée Reclus. One revelled at will in the ruin of every
society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective overthrow
of every society that seemed possible in the future; but meanwhile
these societies which violated every law, moral, arithmetical,
and economical, not only propagated each other, but produced

also fresh complexities with every propagation and developed mass
with every complexity.

The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying discovery
of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as
the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siècle. No one seemed verymuch
concerned about this world or the future, unless it might
be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present.
Adams disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest
in future society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by
irritation at finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he
watched mankind march on, like a train of pack-horses on the
Snake River, tumbling from one morass into another, and at
short intervals, for no reason but temper, falling to butchery, like
Cain. Since 1850, massacres had become so common that society
scarcely noticed them unless they summed up hundreds of
thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost continuous, and
were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South Africa, and
possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them all
not merely unnecessary, but foolish—induced by greed of the
coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still
robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and inevitable,
but the murder seemed altogether archaic.

At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of Pteraspis,
or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral improvement
of society, he took to study of the religious press. Possibly growth
in human nature might show itself there. He found no need to
speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he preferred on
the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment;
and he very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of
religious void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a
future life, or even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an
act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.

The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many
years it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to

care for; if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the
mass of mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics,
travel had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair
had only confused the roads. Accidental education could go no
further, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed beyond
hope with the millions of chance images stored away without order
in the memory. One might as well try to educate a gravel-pit. The
task was futile, which disturbed a student less than the discovery
that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself ridiculous. Nothing
is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow
her to Europe with the Senator and her two sons. The study of
history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of
women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar
enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few
women have ever been known. The woman who is known only
through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like
Mme. de Sévigné, no woman has pictured herself. The American
woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw
her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth;
none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever
be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is
pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth
century was much better company than the American man;
she was probably much better company than her grandmothers.
With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, Senator since 1893, Adams's
relations had been those of elder brother or uncle since 1871 when
Cabot Lodge had left his examination-papers on Assistant Professor
Adams's desk, and crossed the street to Christ Church in
Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself, as scholar, fellow
instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and political
reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but with
him afterwards as politician he had not much relation; and since

Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming
not only a Senator but a Senator from Massachusetts—a
singular social relation which Adams had known only as fatal to
friends—a superstitious student, intimate with the laws of historical
fatality, would rather have recognized him only as an
enemy; but apart from this accident he valued Lodge highly, and
in the waste places of average humanity had been greatly dependent
on his house. Senators can never be approached with
safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and several superior
children who feel no deference for Senators as such, may
be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep
him under restraint.

Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude,
and so it chanced that in August one found one's self for the first
time at Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy.
If history had a chapter with which he thought himself familiar,
it was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor
to do with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture
system turned into green and verdurous virgin forests merely
through the medium of younger eyes and fresher minds. His German
bias must have given his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges
saw at a glance what he had thought unessential because un-German.
They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a compliment
which would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or
even in sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed
life in trying to persuade themselves and the public that they
breathed nothing less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere,
in the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious
humor of the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an
unusual chance, even a Senator became natural, simple, interested,
cultivated, artistic, liberal—genial.

Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room.
One could not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air

of mere antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis;
but it expelled archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without
seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington
with a new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and
in April returned to Mexico with the Camerons to study the
charms of pulque and Churriguerresque architecture. In May he
ran through Europe again with Hay, as far south as Ravenna.
There came the end of the passage. After thus covering once more,
in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home
in October, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and
to start the world anew.

For the old world of public men and measures since 1870,
Adams wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as
partisan or historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or
anything he wanted to save; and in this respect he reflected only
the public mind which balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity
of both parties as to express no sympathy with either.
Even among the most powerful men of that generation he knew
none who had a good word to say for it. No period so thoroughly
ordinary had been known in American politics since Christopher
Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society; but
the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a
small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to
depend abjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged
one's self down the long vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning
heavily on one's friends, and avoiding to look at anything else.
Thus life had grown narrow with years, more and more concentrated
on the circle of houses round La Fayette Square, which
had no direct or personal share in power except in the case of Mr.
Blaine whose tumultuous struggle for existence held him apart.
Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House and laid his
hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole nest
so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the
world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders

for London. Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had
been buried in Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life
either at home or abroad, and broke up his house on the Square.
Only the Lodges and Roosevelts remained, but even they were
at once absorbed in the interests of power. Since 1861, no such
social convulsion had occurred.

Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most strongly
the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the
man in the State Department seemed more important than the
man in the White House. Adams knew no one in the United
States fit to manage these matters in the face of a hostile Europe,
and had no candidate to propose; but he was shocked beyond all
restraints of expression to learn that the President meant to put
Senator John Sherman in the State Department in order to make
a place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himself had done nothing
that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long enough
to distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not
between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for
the place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was notoriously
feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to
Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Department.
One might have shrugged one's shoulders had the President
named Mr. Hanna his Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna was a
man of force if not of experience, and selections much worse than
this had often turned out well enough; but John Sherman must
inevitably and tragically break down.

The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than
all the petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers.
Nor was the matter improved by hints that the President might
call John Hay to the Department whenever John Sherman should
retire. Indeed, had Hay been even unconsciously party to such an

intrigue, he would have put an end, once for all, to further concern
in public affairs on his friend's part; but even without this
last disaster, one felt that Washington had become no longer
habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary contemplation of
Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more amusing
than the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which
offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls
embêtement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely
cause anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!

Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached
the month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years'
dogged effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend
it to the young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had
become more and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the
Civil Law had been locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860.
Noah's dove had not searched the earth for resting-places so carefully,
or with so little success. Any spot on land or water satisfies
a dove who wants and finds rest; but no perch suits a dove
of sixty years old, alone and uneducated, who has lost his taste
even for olives. To this, also, the young may be driven, as education,
and the lesson fails in humor; but it may be worth knowing to
some of them that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an
elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and none at all
where he can pass a year.

Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his
years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the
task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a
right to require amusement—or at least education, since this costs
nothing to any one—and that a world which cannot educate,
will not amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right to exist than
he. Both views seem sound; but the world wearily objects to be

called by epithets what society always admits in practice; for no
one likes to be told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly;
and having nothing to say in its defence, it rejoins that, whatever
license is pardonable in youth, the man of sixty who wishes
consideration had better hold his tongue. This truth also has the
defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for men of half that
age. Only the very young have the right to betray their ignorance
or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to
betray themselves.

Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed
on one point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in
others. Of all characteristics in human nature, this has been one
of the most abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long
history of human expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid
by the wise, shows that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever
existed on this. "Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he
holdeth his peace, is counted wise," and still more often, the wisest
of men, when he spoke the highest wisdom, has been counted a
fool. They agreed only on the merits of silence in others. Socrates
made remarks in its favor, which should have struck the Athenians
as new to them; but of late the repetition had grown tiresome.
Thomas Carlyle vociferated his admiration of it. Matthew Arnold
thought it the best form of expression; and Adams thought Matthew
Arnold the best form of expression in his time. Algernon
Swinburne called it the most noble to the end. Alfred de Vigny's
dying wolf remarked:—

Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have

decided to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm
that—

with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The
evidence of the poets could not be more emphatic:—

Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in silence
as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all philosophy
after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, had ever
been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few were believed
to have attained ignorance, which was in result the same. More
than this, in every society worth the name, the man of sixty had
been encouraged to ride this hobby—the Pursuit of Ignorance
in Silence—as though it were the easiest way to get rid of him.
In America the silence was more oppressive than the ignorance;
but perhaps elsewhere the world might still hide some haunt of
futilitarian silence where content reigned—although long search
had not revealed it—and so the pilgrimage began anew!

The first step led to London where John Hay was to be established.
One had seen so many American Ministers received in
London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more
about it; education could not be expected there; but there Adams
arrived, April 21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many
days, for Queen Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in
St. James's Street. True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets
of Rome, actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt
like Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a "bloodless
fear"; but in spring London is pleasant, and it was more cheery
than ever in May, 1897, when every one was welcoming the return

of life after the long winter since 1893. One's fortunes, or one's
friends' fortunes, were again in flood.

This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's
self the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with
family jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown.
No wrinkled Tannhäuser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a
wrinkled Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and
that even penitence was a sort of impertinence. He slipped away to
Paris, and set up a household at St. Germain where he taught and
learned French history for nieces who swarmed under the venerable
cedars of the Pavillon d'Angoulême, and rode about the green
forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time to time Hay
wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the summer-peace
of the stranded Tannhäuser, who slowly began to feel
at home in France as in other countries he had thought more homelike.
At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because
he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hays
came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a stanch
and strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to Egypt.

Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw
and what they said had as little to do with education as possible,
until one evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the
Nile from Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to
announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was
the greatest stride in education since 1865, but what did it teach?
One leant on a fragment of column in the great hall at Karnak
and watched a jackal creep down the débris of ruin. The jackal's
ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building.
What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the
sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams
had taught him that the relation between civilizations was that
of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast.
He tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went

over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor
of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied
the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian.
His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode
long enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of
thought along the great highways of exchange.