The Invisible Censor Part 4

Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a matter for acute discussion and a.n.a.lysis everywhere, even in casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men afraid to specify the s.e.x diseases they were then cleaning up.

Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions about conduct. "Think," said one delightful youth to me, on my first day in 1991, "think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about 'the pursuit of happiness,' fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for such indiscriminateness than we'd allow a day to go by without swimming."

The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire's device I had once seen in Chicago. Deep in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a great factory building there was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was, in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same aesthetic relation to a real horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured out, so to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald bas.e.m.e.nt cell with its two barred bas.e.m.e.nt windows (closed), the constipated millionaires take their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned motions of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front of them. So far, in 1919, had the wors.h.i.+p of Hygeia carried the helot-captains of industry. And from that bas.e.m.e.nt, from that heathen symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years.

And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness they long for.

CHICAGO

A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they can give no penetrating account of their affection. "What is the finest town in the world?" the New York reporters recently asked a young recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. "Why," he answered, "San Malo, France. I was born there." That is the usual reason, perhaps the best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is autobiographical.

But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to pretend that there was no "soul" in Chicago either to like or to dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in pa.s.sing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and slipped into Chicago as into old slippers-men like Arnold Bennett and George Bermingham-there are few outsiders who really feel at home.

Stevenson pa.s.sed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains, pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without s.p.a.ciousness, opportunity without imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining s.m.u.ts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town.

But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is supremely necessary-about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness pa.s.seth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed.

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned, to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War.

They will also understand and rejoice over the repet.i.tion of grand old names-Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Ura.n.u.s H. Crosby, Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too "knew Chicago when." Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the "fast young men"

speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his high-steppers to the races at Was.h.i.+ngton Park, and did he not woo the heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a "nod of recognition from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice." The dinners of antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago antedating the World's Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the fair pages of this book.

But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor's heart lingers among the "marble-fronts" of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it, battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor's better explanation, as I read it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and aliens-all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in Chicago is his community with its origins in "men, like myself, of New England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie land." Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive was still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side.

This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago's puritan "aristocracy" is the source of Chicago altruism, that "the society of Chicago [is] more puritanical than that of any great city in the world," and that "back of Chicago's strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to leaven her diverse character and make her truly-the pulse of America."

Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest.

Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished Chicago's big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmans.h.i.+p in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced.

One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor's pleasant picture, some leaves from Upton Sinclair's Jungle, Jack London's Iron Heel, Frank Norris's Pit, H. K. Webster's Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that inst.i.tution of collective life.

They called the old-time aldermen the "gray wolves." They looked like wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side, West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place that was glibly described as "the wickedest place in the world." It was a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots, the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both s.e.xes, the woman of a fat pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead's Satanic vision of it revealed.

But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and pa.s.sionate creator struggling with hucksters and hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the a.s.sa.s.sins of genius, a frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism, there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle, whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one lament the silence in Mr. Taylor's pleasant book. But the puritanical tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it made visible Chicago what it is.

_Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Ill.u.s.trations by Lester G.

Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co._

THE CLOUDS OF KERRY

It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes Kerry so wet. All the reservoir of the Atlantic, at any rate, lies to the west and south, and the prevailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry lifts its mountains to those impinging winds-mountains that in the sunlight are a living colorful presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly from the sea, soft voluminous clouds gathered in their arms, and as they pa.s.s they sweep their drooping veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy land.

In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great intervals on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habitations are in the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel hills. The soil on the mountains is washed away. The vest.i.ture that remains is a watery sedge, and it is only by garnering every handful of earth that the tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. Their fields, often held in common, are so small as to be laughable, and deep drainage trenches are dug every few yards. Sometimes in the s.h.i.+fting sunlight between showers a light-green patch will loom magically in the distance, witness to man's indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the rocks. An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes there one may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and sharp of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of children. To build with his own hands a watertight house is the ambition for which this man is slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready there near the pit which he himself has dug for foundation. A yellowish wife will perhaps be nursing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed hovel, and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, and admirable in more ways than he can ever dream of, one elf after another will come out, bare-legged, sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from far off at the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside man, but his starvelings go down the boreen to the bare cold schoolhouse, to be taught whatever the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their minds of an education designed for civil service clerks. The children may be seen down there if one pa.s.ses at their playtime, kicking a rag football with their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds.

There was a time when the iron was deep in these farmers' souls. Eking the marrow from the bones of the land, they were so poor that they had nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their own tiny cattle, the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle that alone can pick a living from that ground. Until twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the hillside men had never bought a pound of tea in their lives, or known what it was to spend money for clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine st.u.r.dy middle-aged farmers with a cut to their homemade clothes that reminds one of the Bretons. It was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting nature for grim life, that landlords took their rackrents-one of them, the Earl of Kenmare, erecting a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of Americans have admired. The fight against landlordism was bitter in Kerry. I met one countryman who was evicted three times, but finally, despite the remorseless protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in a lean-to against the wall of the church. There were persecutions and murders, the mailed hand of the law and the stealthy hand of the a.s.sa.s.sin. Even to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure of me he would not have spoken his mind. But when he was sure, he confided with a winning smile that at last he had something to live for and work for, a strip of land that was an "economic holding," determined by an Estates Commission which has shouldered the landlord to one side and estimated with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog.

Why do they stay? But most of them have not stayed. Kerry has not one-third the people to-day that it had seventy years ago. The storekeeper in a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little father of the people if there ever was one, yet had acted the dubious role of emigration agent, and had pa.s.sed thousands of his countrymen on to America. A few go to England. "For nine years," one hard-working occupier mentioned to me, "I lived in the shadow of London Bridge." But for Kerry, the next country to America, America is the land of golden promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, "hollow of the dock leaves," I stopped to ask of a bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking me the way to America. It is west they turn, away from the Empire that "always foul-played us in the past, and I am afeard will foul-play us again."

"The next time you come, please G.o.d you'll bring us Home Rule." That is the way they speak to you, if they trust you. They want government where it cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of old.

I went with a government inspector on one mission in Kerry. At the foot of the forbidding western hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off by two mountain streams. At times these streams were low enough to ford with ease, but after a heavy rain the water would rise four or five feet in a few hours and the streams would become impa.s.sable torrents. For the sake of a widow whose hovel stood on this island the Commission consented to build a little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons in weight, had only just been planted when a rain came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy block of cement had toppled over in the stream. This little catastrophe was the first news conveyed by the paternal storekeeper to the inspector on our arrival in town, and we walked out to see what could be done.

Standing by the stream, we were visible to the expectant woman on the hill. In the soft mournful light of the September afternoon I could see her outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to learn her fate.

She came bare of head and bare of foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to her bosom with one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body as she leaned on her own pier and bent her deep eyes on us across the stream.

As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant fighter. She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have ever beheld.

If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the anxieties of the winter. She seemed to look into them through the grayness of the failing light. She foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race for her children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying them across on her back. And she clung to her children.

"You have had trouble, my poor woman?" the inspector said, knowing that her husband two years before had been drowned in the torrent.

"Aye, indeed, your honor, 'tis I am the pity of the world. One year ago my child was lost to me. It was in the night-time, he was taken with a hemorrhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the children to have them go for to bring the doctor, but it was too late an they returned.

He quenched in my arms, at the dead hour of night."

"The pity of the world" she was in truth. The inspector could do nothing until the ground was firm enough to support horses and tackle in the spring. We walked back through the somber bog, the mountains seeming to creep after us, and we speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there we came on another aspect of that plaintive acquiescence so strong in the woman. Yes, the storekeeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector was right: Foley had failed about the bridge. "I'll haul him over," he said, full of sympathy for the woman. And he would haul him over. And the pier would lie there all winter.

If the people could feel that this solicitude of the Estates Commission were national, it would bind them to the government. But most of the inspectors are of the landlord world, ruling-cla.s.s appointees, well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between the lines. And so Kerry remains with the old tradition of the government, suspicious of its intentions, crediting what genuine services there are to the race of native officials who alone have the intuition of Kerry's kind.

They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend the Empire; that Empire which meant landlords and land agents and rackrents for so many blind and crus.h.i.+ng years. They want those straight and stalwart and manly fellows in the trenches. But Kerry knows what the trenches of Empire are already. It has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs between spa.r.s.e ridges of potatoes, for all the years it can remember. It is no wonder Kerry cannot grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted a lease to live.

HENRY ADAMS

Henry Adams was born with his name on the waiting list of Olympus, and he lived up to it. He lived up to it part of the time in London, as secretary to his father at the Emba.s.sy; part of the time at Harvard, teaching history; most of the time in Was.h.i.+ngton, in La Fayette Square.

Shortly before he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the United States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and Olympus were confused. But not so long after 1838 the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to control the country through the railroads there was an inevitable s.h.i.+ft in political gravity, and the center of power became Ohio. It was Henry Adams's fate to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in power; and Ohio did not comprehend Adams's credentials. Those credentials, accordingly, were the subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor.

They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history, and Henry Adams gave a dozen years to Jefferson and Madison. It was his humor afterwards to say he had but three serious readers-Abram Hewitt, Wayne MacVeagh and John Hay. His composure in the face of this coolness was, however, a strange blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos and from La Fayette Square. He was not above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even his autobiography, a true t.i.tle to Olympus, was issued to a bare hundred readers before his death, and was then deemed too incomplete to be made public. It is made public now nominally for "students" but really for the world that didn't know an Adams when it saw one.

For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry Adams had the advantage of full years and happy faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of both. He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality which is a bad tradition in English recollections. He saved himself from mere recollections by taking the world as an educator and himself as an experiment in education. His two big books were contrasted as _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity_, and _The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity_. The stress on multiplicity was all the more important because he considered himself eighteenth century to start with, and had, in fact, the unity of simple Americanism at the beginning.

Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of basil in this always expanding tale of a development. There are points about the development, about its acceptance of a "supersensual multiverse", which only a Karl Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily discuss or criticize. A reader like myself gazes through the gla.s.s bottom of Adams's style into unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths are clear and crisp. They deserve to be investigated. But a "dynamic theory of history" is no proper inhabitant of autobiography, and "the larger synthesis" is not yet so domesticated as the plebeian idea of G.o.d. That Adams should conduct his study to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent culmination. A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual riddle of living. But when the theory must be technical and even professional, an autobiography has no climax in a theory. It is better to revert, as Adams does, to the cla.s.sic features of human drama: "Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone-but never hustled." It is enough to have the knowledge that along certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered and the new conceptions pushed forward, the tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in the twentieth century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of acceleration.

Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams embraced the modernity that gradually dawned on him and gave him his new view of life. Take his fresh enthusiasm for world's fairs as a solitary example. One might expect him to be bored by them, but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford White and Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of America, and Henry Adams soared over their obviousness to a perception of their "acutely interesting" exhibits. He was after-something. If the Virgin Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or St. Louis could give it to him among the Jugo-Slavs and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done.

No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could interpret the fight for free silver without a sniff of impatience, who could study Grant without the least filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his nose at unfas.h.i.+onable faiths or to espouse fas.h.i.+onable heresies. He was after education and any century back or forward was grist to his mill. And his faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in it. "All one's life,"

as he confesses grimly, "one had struggled for unity, and unity had always won," yet "the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was increasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason." Beyond reason, then, it was reasonable to proceed, and the son of Amba.s.sador Adams moved from the sanct.i.ty of Union with his feet feeling what way they must, and his eye on the star of truth.

So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how keen it is. But there is no single dullness, as I remember, in 505 large pages, and there are portraits like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or the Adamses, which have the economy and fidelity of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, nor is he a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and he can load a sentence with a world of meaning. Take, for instance, the phrase in which he denies unity to London society. "One wandered about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time." He says of St. Gaudens that "he never laid down the law, or affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his world." In a masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, "The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it.... She must, like the man, marry machinery." In Cambridge "the liveliest and most agreeable of men-James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Aga.s.siz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or Paris-tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for companions.h.i.+p, all were famished for want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of elements-people who are expected to be silent unless they have observations to make-and all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to make observations."

Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact, that Henry Adams himself felt the necessity of making observations. He approached autobiography b.u.t.toned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human beings he had a real impulse to release himself, and to release himself in an autobiography if nowhere else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he could no more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day than he could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the Adamses were inst.i.tutional he could talk of them openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge and St. Gaudens as any liberated host might reveal himself in the warm hour after dinner. But this is not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry Adams was not Dionysiac. He was not limitedly Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was receptive, he was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the mere mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface of this autobiography raises doubts as to Henry Adams's evasive principle, "the object of study is the garment, not the figure." The figure, Henry Adams's, had nagging interest for Henry Adams, but something racial required him to veil it. He could not, like a Rousseau or "like a wh.o.r.e, unpack his heart with words."

The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on the word "education."

Although he was nearly seventy when he laid the book aside and although education means nothing if it means everything, the whole seventy years were deliberately taken as devotion to a process, that process being visualized much more as the interminable repet.i.tion of the educational escalator itself than as the progress of the person who moves forward with it. Moves forward to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams's detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak of his life as perpetually educational. One reason, of course, was his economic security. There was no wolf to devour him if his education proved incomplete. Faculty _qua_ faculty could remain a permanent quandary to him, so long as he were not forced to be vocational, so long as he could speculate on "a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder."

The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however, is one of the princ.i.p.al fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay? What was it that sent him from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres? The man was a capable and ambitious man, if ever there was one. He was not merely erudite and reflective and emanc.i.p.atingly skeptical: he was also a man of the largest inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man of the nicest temper and the sanest style. How could such justesse go begging, even in the United States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen he sat waiting for a clientage that never came, while through a hole he could see a steady crowd go pouring into the gilded doors across the way. The modest screen was himself. He could not detach it. But the United States did not see beyond the screen. A light behind a large globule of colored water could at any moment distract it. And in England, for that matter, only the Monckton Milneses kept the Delanes from brus.h.i.+ng Adams away, like a fly.