University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXIV
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 Cœli 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 Cæsar. 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 Elysée 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=gt2 / 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.