University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXXII
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 Élysées 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
he 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 straightforward
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 Fête 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 [ILLUSTRATION], 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 châteaux, 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 no
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, Cæsars,
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 Cœli 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.