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-class 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 crushing 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 sparse 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[2]
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 Embassy; part of the time at Harvard, teaching history; most of the time in Washington, 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 shift 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 title 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 glass 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 God. 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 classic 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.