As Adams sat with the large dark-blue volume in his hands and listened to the clanging and honking of streetcars and automobiles on Lafayette Square, he felt more keenly than ever the chasm between Virgin and dynamo. The United States, he remarked to an English friend, “has no character but prodigious force,—at least twenty million horsepower constant.” Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres was his protest against this monstrous power, his “declaration of principles as head of the Conservative Christian Anarchists; a party numbering one member. The Virgin and St. Thomas are my vehicles of anarchism. Nobody knows enough to see what they mean, so the Judges will probably not be able to burn me.”
To friends who thought the book deserved a larger audience, Henry replied that the Virgin was not a commercial commodity. Having copyrighted it and presented copies to several libraries, he considered it published in the strictest sense of the word. He would not write for the public because he did not know who the public was. His own public, he imagined, had never exceeded “a score.”
Anything which has helped to bring that score into closer understanding and sympathy, has been worth doing. Any expression which makes on me the illusion of having done anything towards sympathy … is as near positive satisfaction as St. Francis or Pascal or I could reach. We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence. The world, if it exists, feels exactly in the same way towards us, and cares not one straw whether we exist or not. Philosophy has never got beyond this point. There are but two schools; one turns the world into me; the other turns me into the world; and the result is the same. The so-called me is a very, very small and foolish puppy-dog, but it is all that exists, and it tries all its life to get a little bigger by enlarging its energies, and getting dollars or getting friends.
For the dollars he had never cared, but the friends had meant everything. Now they were gone—Clover and her brother and sister to suicide. Clarence King to tuberculosis. Though Lizzie Cameron and John Hay remained, one was lost to Paris, the other to the poison of power. After five years in the State Department, Hay had no more emotional range than a caged rat, it seemed to Adams. “So,” he sighed to Lizzie, “I have outlived everybody and everything on the Square, and gaze off into the infinite.”
The year 1905 opened with a visit from Henry James. It was his first stay in the capital since 1882, and once again he gravitated to the home of Henry Adams. Above all else in Washington he wanted to see the Saint-Gaudens sculpture at Clover’s grave. Unable to put the request to his host, who still forbade any mention of his wife, James confided his predicament to Margaret Chanler, a regular at the breakfast table. Together they slipped away in her brougham and rode out to the snowy slopes of the cemetery at Rock Creek Church. James bared his head and stood silently before the figure for a long time. On the ride home he spoke warmly of Clover’s wit and grace. “We never knew how delightful Henry was till he lost her,” James told Mrs. Chanler, “he was so proud of her that he let her shine as he sat back and enjoyed listening to what she said and what she let others say.”
As far as James could see, the passage of two decades had left little imprint on Washington. The trees had grown up, softening the skeletal hardness of the architecture, but the city seemed “overweighted by a single Dome and overaccented by a single Shaft.” Looking at the hodgepodge of statuary in the Rotunda of the Capitol, he decided that it was, quite inadvertently, a perfect statement of “the collective vibrations of a people; their conscious spirit, their public faith, their bewildered taste, their ceaseless curiosity, their arduous and interrupted education.”
James abominated the scale and power of America’s industrial society, the ostentation of the rich, the ugliness of the cities. How could one admire a land whose greatest source of pride seemed to be the prevalence of the indoor water closet? Punctuating himself into a frenzy, he ranted, “There is NO ‘fascination’ whatever, in anything or anyone: that is exactly what there isn’t.” Like Clover Adams on the Nile, James rebelled against “the perpetual effort of trying to ‘do justice’ to what one doesn’t like.”
Nonetheless, it consoled him to find that Washington was still the “City of Conversation,” the title he had bestowed in 1882. It talked incessantly, of itself and nothing else, making for “one of the happiest cases of collective self-consciousness” he knew. As the only American city that did not bow to the great god Business, Washington offered the visitor a view of society as society, and for James, “that rich little fact became the key to everything.”
Part of James’s affection for Washington sprang from Washington’s affection for him. No less a power than Henry Cabot Lodge escorted him to Capitol Hill to watch the Senate at work. Secretary of State John Hay hosted a banquet in his honor, and Theodore Roosevelt, who had once reviled him in print as “a miserable little snob,” invited him to dine.
James passed through the high iron palings of the White House and made his way up the drive on January 12, 1905. The executive mansion, alone in a spacious setting, struck him as the noblest edifice in the capital—serene, graceful, unpretentious. The facade scarcely prepared him for the grandiosity within. The president had renounced all imperial ambitions, but as James saw at once, Roosevelt did not need an empire to enjoy playing emperor. “Theodore Rex,” as James privately christened him, had created a court complete with crimson silk ropes to cordon the sheep from the goats and platoons of aides-de-camp in splendid regalia. (Theodore Rex had succeeded in putting nearly everyone but the diplomatic corps in uniform. In that enterprise he had been stopped cold by Elihu Root, who observed that the only fitting item of apparel for America’s envoys would be a coat featuring a tail embroidered with a sprig of mistletoe.) Wondering what the masses made of Theodore’s monarchical appetites, James supposed that they tolerated the pomp because they liked the man.
At dinner the president favored the novelist with a seat near his own, which enabled James to see that Roosevelt talked even more, and with even more self-absorption, than Washington itself. Theodore was “a wonderful little machine,” James reported to his friend Edith Wharton, “destined to be overstrained perhaps, but not as yet, truly, betraying the least creak.”
Events forged one more link between Roosevelt and James before James departed the capital. With Henry Adams and five others, they were nominated to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a body organized the year before with John Hay, John La Farge, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens among its first seven members. Adams accepted, and James overcame the twinges he felt at being offered the honor after decades of abusing his native land. Only Theodore Roosevelt had qualms. He did not intend to become a member of this “foolish” Academy unless all the other nominees accepted, he told Hay. Even then, he wondered whether he should take part. “Doesn’t it seem to you a rather ridiculous thing to try to start such an academy?” In his judgment, such institutions tended to do more for the second-rate than for “permanent literature.” By joining, they ran the risk of turning themselves into laughingstocks.
With admirable restraint Hay replied that he considered the list of nominees “unexpectedly good.” He speculated that all would accept and pointed out that while the Academy could not possibly enhance Roosevelt’s glory, his acceptance would add luster to the Academy.
“All right, I accepted at once,” Roosevelt growled. “What is good enough for you is most certainly good enough for me.”
Henry James left town with only one worry about the new Academy. Assigning Adams the task of devising a proper uniform, he begged him to “keep it cheap. Think what Theodore will want.”
On March 4, Inauguration Day, Theodore Roosevelt went to Capitol Hill wearing the latest version of a gift that John Hay had presented to several other Republican chief executives—a ring containing a few strands of presidential hair, this time from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Deeply touched, Roosevelt had written him, “I wonder if you have any idea what your strength and wisdom and sympathy, what the guidance you have given me and the
mere delight in your companionship, have meant to me in these three and a half years?” The softness came easily. Like Hay’s other intimates, Roosevelt realized that the secretary of state probably would not live to see another inauguration.
Two weeks into the new administration, Hay boarded an ocean liner with his wife and Henry Adams for a Mediterranean cruise. Exhausted, he stumbled on the pier and had to be helped up the gangplank. The newspapermen who witnessed the fall reported that the secretary of state was dying. Hay hastened to assure his nineteen-year-old son Clarence that the reporters were wrong; after a week of resting in his cabin, he was walking the decks for a mile or two every day.
When the travelers reached the Italian coast in April, Hay had good days and bad. Watching John and Clara set off on a stroll, Adams wondered whether Clara would bring him back on a stretcher or chase him home at a run; both seemed equally possible. Hay wrote Roosevelt that he was “decidedly better” than when he left Washington, “though far from what your Secretary of State ought to be.” The doctors diagnosed a heart problem and prescribed a rest cure at Bad Nauheim in Germany. “This involves parting with the Porcupinus Angelicus, and I would almost rather keep the diseases,” Hay lamented to Saint-Gaudens. “He has been kindness itself—the Porcupine has ‘passed in music out of sight’ and the Angel has been perfected in him.”
Toward the end of May, when Hay left Nauheim, he was told that he would survive if he continued to rest. The physician told Clara that on landing in New York, they were to go straight to Lake Sunapee, and Hay was to avoid exertion until autumn. Hay felt sufficiently buoyed to tell Roosevelt that “a complete cure” was in the offing, but he acknowledged that his usefulness in the State Department might be at an end: “I need not say that when you think a change would be, for any reason, advisable, I shall go.”
Booked for a June 7 sailing, the Hays spent a few days in Paris with Henry Adams, who whirled them about the city in his latest toy, a 1904 Mercedes. On June 2, Henry drove them to the train station and said farewell. En route to Southampton, they paused in London but saw no one, at the insistence of Hay’s physician. Avoiding his English friends made Hay feel furtive and morose, and he was overjoyed when Cecil Spring Rice managed to slip through the net for a short visit.
From their ballroom-size quarters aboard the R.M.S. Baltic, Clara sent Henry cheerful notes on John’s progress. John, declaring himself “a little to the good since Paris,” chatted nonchalantly about European politics. Adams was not deceived. He knew that Hay was doomed.
Hay soon admitted as much to himself, at least in the pages of his diary. On June 13 he recorded a dream in which he had gone to the White House to report to the president, “who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln. He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He said there was little work of importance on hand. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was in my power to obey.” Encountering the hero of his youth had not surprised him, he said, but the dream left him with a feeling of “overpowering melancholy.” A day later he summed up his life in a passage obviously meant to soften his family’s grief.
I say to myself that I should not rebel at the thought of my life ending at this time. I have lived to be old; something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all. I have lived my life. I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood. My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualifications, which may, I suppose, be called fame. By mere length of service I shall occupy a modest place in the history of my time. If I were to live several years more I should probably add nothing to my existing reputation; while I could not reasonably expect any further enjoyment of life, such as falls to the lot of old men in sound health. I know death is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune; and yet—instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, I cling instinctively to life and the things of life, as eagerly as if I had not had my chance at happiness and gained nearly all the great prizes.
Hay died in his bed at Lake Sunapee at 12:25 A.M. on July 1. The next day, swathed in a heavy veil, Clara and her son Clarence rode down Mount Sunapee to the village of Newbury, where a special train waited to carry Hay’s body to Cleveland. “As he had told me once he did not care where I laid him and as our boy was there it seemed more like home,” she wrote in John’s diary after the funeral. Theodore Roosevelt and his entire cabinet came from Washington, but Clara scarcely noticed. “The service was very simple and I could not realize that it was he who was being removed from my sight. All signs of death were concealed and nothing to show that it was the end was visible. I cannot yet realize what has happened. I am paralyzed and numb. I suppose I will wake up some day and will know.”
23
Playing Out the Hand
That evening, when word reached Henry Adams in Paris, he thought first of himself. “Hay’s death strands me,” he mourned. “I am now left quite alone, with no thought or wish except to follow as quietly and easily as possible.”
His next thoughts, born of a habit so old and deep it had become instinct, were of his friends. Knowing that Clara would blame herself for the failure of John’s medical treatment, Henry hastened to assure her that she had been “superb.” He also flew to the side of Nannie Lodge, who was vacationing in Paris with Cabot. But there was little to say. Nannie could not grieve openly for Hay, nor would she care to hear Henry’s theory that Hay had been murdered by Cabot and his Senate colleagues. Though Adams struggled to conceal his loathing for Cabot, who had become physically repulsive to him, Nannie saw “every shade” of his feelings, he told Lizzie. “We keep up a sort of mask-play together, each knowing the other to the ground. She kept it up with Hay to the end. It has gone on for years, and may go on for more, but only on condition that I do not let my irritability show itself.”
At the White House, Hay’s death loosed a torrent of emotion. Calling Hay a “wise and patient advisor” and the most charming of friends, Theodore Roosevelt told Clara that no one in the administration could fill his place. But the secretary of state had been dead for only three weeks when the president turned against him. While Hay’s reputation and loyalty were genuine assets, his declining health and his Anglophilia had impeded the business of state, Roosevelt grumbled to Lodge. “I had to do the big things myself, and the other things I always feared would be badly done or not done at all.” In Roosevelt’s view, Hay’s English leanings meant that he could not be trusted to deal with Germany or Britain. Nor did Roosevelt sympathize with Hay’s perennial woes in the Senate: “the business of an active politician is not to complain of defects which cannot be changed, but to do the best he can in spite of them.”
Theodore’s revisionism would not have surprised Henry Adams. After four years of watching Hay writhe, and curse himself for writhing, under the heels of men like Lodge and Roosevelt, Adams knew all. He would wear the mask with Nannie but not with Theodore. After Hay’s death, Adams and Roosevelt rarely saw each other.
With his intimate knowledge and impassioned opinions, Adams felt he could not possibly write a memoir of John Hay, and he dreaded the day when Clara might suggest it. In self-defense he began writing a book about his own life, hoping that its portrayal of Hay would exempt him from the task of a full-scale biography. By the end of 1906, The Education of Henry Adams was ready for the printer.
The Education was not an autobiography, Adams insisted. It was a reflection on an age of multiplicity, a companion to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, which had been a study of an age of unity. The title character was “purely imaginary”—a narrative device in service of a larger point. To strengthen the fiction, he wrote in the third person, dissecting Henry Adams as coolly as if he were a corpse on a slab.
Autobiography or no, the Education caught the essence of Henry Adams: the deeply divided self that made him both angel and porcupine, a skeptic in search of faith, and powerless friend o
f the powerful. Born in a climate of bitter winters and blistering summers, he had sensed from earliest childhood that life was “a double thing.” As an adult, he felt himself crawling painfully along a knife edge, aware of the Virgin on one side and the dynamo on the other but unable to surrender to either force. The American man was a failure, the woman no better: neither sex seemed to understand that woman should be worshiped because “she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies.” He said not a word about his own childless marriage or his wife. The other great feminine presence in his life, Lizzie Cameron, was dismissed in half a line as one of the chief “dispensers of sunshine” on Lafayette Square.
The irony at the heart of the Education was the author’s abiding ignorance despite a life spent in quest of enlightenment. Harvard College had left nothing but “an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped.” Trained as idealists and reformers, Adams and his classmates had gone forth into a world that had no use for them. There were other disappointments. Hay and Adams had devoted years and vast sums of money to the writing of histories that no one cared to read. The greatest artists of their day—Saint-Gaudens, La Farge, and Richardson—had won little acclaim. Casting about for the organizing principle of such a universe, Adams concluded, “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” To his baffled mind, only chaos and its cognates—chance, luck, fate, accident—could explain how a man as unambitious as John Hay rose to the head of the State Department while the drive and brilliance of Clarence King ended in ruin. King’s failure taught “whatever the bystander chose to read in it, but to Adams it seemed singularly full of moral, if he could but understand it.”
The Five of Hearts Page 42