Chapter XXIII (The Education of Henry Adams)

{CH_XXIII
CHAPTER XXIII
Silence (1894-1898)
–
THE convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed
much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such
as no one had thought within its powers, the individual crawled as
he best could, through the wreck, and found many values of life upset.
But for connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four
years, 1893 to 1897, had no value in the drama of education, and might
be left out. Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890
perished in the ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been the
fortunes of Clarence King. The lesson taught whatever the bystander
chose to read in it; but to Adams it seemed singularly full of
moral, if he could but understand it. In 1871 he had thought King’s
education ideal, and his personal fitness unrivalled. No other young
American approached him for the combination of chances- physical
energy, social standing, mental scope and training, wit, geniality,
and science, that seemed superlatively American and irresistibly
strong. His nearest rival was Alexander Agassiz, and, as far as
their friends knew, no one else could be classed with them in the
running. The result of twenty years’ effort proved that the theory
of scientific education failed where most theory fails- for want of
money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he thought, quite
outside of every possible financial risk, had been caught in the cogs,
and held for months over the gulf of bankruptcy, saved only by the
chance that the whole class of millionaires were more or less bankrupt
too, and the banks were forced to let the mice escape with the rats;
but, in sum, education without capital could always be taken by the
throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped by the
knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered.
Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education was the same.
The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to back it, was
flagrant.
The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science should
be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless without
money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to be frozen
out. Education must fit the complex conditions of a new society,
always accelerating its movement, and its fitness could be known
only from success. One looked about for examples of success among
the educated of one’s time- the men born in the thirties, and
trained to professions. Within one’s immediate acquaintance, three
were typical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and William C. Whitney; all
of whom owed their free hand to marriage, education serving only for
ornament, but among whom, in 1893, William C. Whitney was far and away
the most popular type.
Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was
exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very
rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might
occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them, and
never showed them respect. Scarcely one of the very rich men held
any position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been
elected to an office, or even into a good club. Setting aside the few,
like Pierpont Morgan, whose social position had little to do with
greater or less wealth, riches were in New York no object of envy on
account of the joys they brought in their train, and Whitney was not
even one of the very rich; yet in his case the envy was palpable.
There was reason for it. Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with
politics after having gratified every ambition, and swung the
country almost at his will; he had thrown away the usual objects of
political ambition like the ashes of smoked cigarettes; had turned
to other amusements, satiated every taste, gorged every appetite,
won every object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had
carried his field of activity abroad, until New York no longer knew
what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had succeeded
precisely where Clarence King had failed.
Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal;
but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an American education
ought to be in order to count as success. Even granting that it
counted as money, its value could not be called general. America
contained scores of men worth five millions or upwards, whose lives
were no more worth living than those of their cooks, and to whom the
task of making money equivalent to education offered more difficulties
than to Adams the task of making education equivalent to money. Social
position seemed to have value still, while education counted for
nothing. A mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if
fortunate, might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open
market. An administrator, organizer, manager, with mediaeval qualities
of energy and will, but no education beyond his special branch,
would probably be worth at least ten times as much.
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 5}
Society had failed to discover what sort of education suited it
best. Wealth valued social position and classical education as
highly as either of these valued wealth, and the women still tended to
keep the scales even. For anything Adams could see he was himself as
contented as though he had been educated; while Clarence King, whose
education was exactly suited to theory, had failed; and Whitney, who
was not better educated than Adams, had achieved phenomenal success.
Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile use
of the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish.
With these he could still make his way to any object within his
vision, and would have a decisive advantage over nine rivals in ten.
Statesman or lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest or professor,
native or foreign, he would fear none.
King’s breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced
him to go to Cuba, where in January, 1894, they drifted into the
little town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society, which King
knew well, was more amusing than any other that one had yet discovered
in the whole broad world, but made no profession of teaching
anything unless it were Cuban Spanish or the danza; and neither on his
own nor on King’s account did the visitor ask any loftier study than
that of the buzzards floating on the trade-wind down the valley to Dos
Bocas, or the colors of sea and shore at sunrise from the height of
the Gran Piedra; but, as though they were still twenty years old and
revolution were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never
been solid, fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of
mischief. In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were
always falling on one’s head, and, of all lessons, these constant
political convulsions taught least. Since the time of Rameses,
revolutions have raised more doubts than they solved, but they have
sometimes the merit of changing one’s point of view, and the Cuban
rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams to a
Democratic administration. He thought that President Cleveland could
have settled the Cuban question, without war, had he chosen to do
his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the Democratic Party,
joined with the stress of economical needs and the gold standard to
break into bits the old organization and to leave no choice between
parties. The new American, whether consciously or not, had turned
his back on the nineteenth century before he was done with it; the
gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass could
have no other outcome, and, as so often before, the movement, once
accelerated by attempting to impede it, had the additional, brutal
consequence of crushing equally the good and the bad that stood in its
way.
The lesson was old- so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex, among
the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never been
fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more amusing for
their torpor. After passing the winter with King in the West Indies,
he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and found there
little to study. The Geysers were an old story; the Snake River
posed no vital statistics except in its fordings; even the Tetons were
as calm as they were lovely; while the wapiti and bear, innocent of
strikes and corners, laid no traps. In return the party treated them
with affection. Never did a band less bloody or blood-thirsty wander
over the roof of the continent. Hay loved as little as Adams did,
the labor of skinning and butchering big game; he had even outgrown
the sedate, middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found
the trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips
himself, who managed the party, loved to play Indian hunter without
hunting so much as a field-mouse; Iddings the geologist was reduced to
shooting only for the table, and the guileless prattle of Billy
Hofer alone taught the simple life. Compared with the Rockies of 1871,
the sense of wildness had vanished; one saw no possible adventures
except to break one’s neck as in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more
intelligent ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociable bear.
When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway
systems yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and no
sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography than
with desperate thirst for exhausting the American field, he set out
for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean and
clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least twenty thousand
miles of American land and water.
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 10}
He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in April,
1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life- tropical islands,
mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types. Infinitely more
amusing and incomparably more picturesque than civilization, they
educated only artists, and, as one’s sixtieth year approached, the
artist began to die; only a certain intense cerebral restlessness
survived which no longer responded to sensual stimulants; one was
driven from beauty to beauty as though art were a trotting-match.
For this, one was in some degree prepared, for the old man had been
a stage-type since drama began; but one felt some perplexity to
account for failure on the opposite or mechanical side, where
nothing but cerebral action was needed.
Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic, he
plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find the
surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had ever
approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited statistics,
endless columns of figures, bottomless averages merely for the asking.
At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Ford supplied any material that
curiosity could imagine for filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and
methods for applying the plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to
be winning ground, and one’s averages projected themselves as laws
into the future. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay
in the attitude of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic
confidence in their own figures. They should have reached certainty,
but they talked like other men who knew less. The method did not
result in faith. Indeed, every increase of mass- of volume and
velocity- seemed to bring in new elements, and, at last, a scholar,
fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious
terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came out as it
should. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up or
pull down a society. One could frame no sort of satisfactory answer to
the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the destructive
criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic imprecations of Elisee
Reclus. One revelled at will in the ruin of every society in the past,
and rejoiced in proving the prospective overthrow of every society
that seemed possible in the future; but meanwhile these societies
which violated every law, moral, arithmetical, and economical, not
only propagated each other, but produced also fresh complexities
with every propagation and developed mass with every complexity.
The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying discovery of
Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as the
conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very much
concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the
anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams
disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future
society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at
finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind
march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling
from one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason
but temper, falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres
had become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they
summed up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost
continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South
Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them
all not merely unnecessary, but foolish- induced by greed of the
coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still
robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and
inevitable, but the murder seemed altogether archaic.
At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of Pteraspis,
or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral improvement of
society, he took to study of the religious press. Possibly growth in
human nature might show itself there. He found no need to speak
unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he preferred on the
whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment; and he
very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of religious void,
whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or even
for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an act, or an expression,
or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.
The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care
for; if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the
mass of mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics,
travel had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair had only
confused the roads. Accidental education could go no further, for
one’s mind was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the
millions of chance images stored away without order in the memory. One
might as well try to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile,
which disturbed a student less than the discovery that, in pursuing
it, he was becoming himself ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome
than a superannuated pedagogue.
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 15}
For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman. Towards
midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe with
the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is useful to the
historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of this
ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called
historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and
excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured
herself. The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only
as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman
of the eighteenth; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can
ever be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all
this is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth
century was much better company than the American man: she was
probably much better company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge
and her husband, Senator since 1893, Adams’s relations had been
those of elder brother or uncle since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left
his examination-papers on Assistant Professor Adams’s desk, and
crossed the street to Christ Church in Cambridge to get married.
With Lodge himself, as scholar, fellow instructor, co-editor of the
North American Review, and political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he
had worked intimately, but with him afterwards as politician he had
not much relation; and since Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the
misfortune of becoming not only a Senator but a Senator from
Massachusetts- a singular social relation which Adams had known only
as fatal to friends- a superstitious student, intimate with the laws
of historical fatality, would rather have recognized him only as an
enemy; but apart from this accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the
waste places of average humanity had been greatly dependent on his
house. Senators can never be approached with safety, but a Senator who
has a very superior wife and several superior children who feel no
deference for Senators as such, may be approached at times with
relative impunity while they keep him under restraint.
Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it
chanced that in August one found one’s self for the first time at
Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history had a
chapter with which he thought himself familiar, it was the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do with knowledge
that these bare playgrounds of the lecture system turned into green
and verdurous virgin forests merely through the medium of younger eyes
and fresher minds. His German bias must have given his youth a
terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought
unessential because un-German. They breathed native air in the
Normandy of 1200, a compliment which would have seemed to the
Senator lacking in taste or even in sense when addressed to one of a
class of men who passed life in trying to persuade themselves and
the public that they breathed nothing less American than a blizzard;
but this atmosphere, in the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the
unconscious humor of the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century,
by an unusual chance, even a Senator became natural, simple,
interested, cultivated, artistic, liberal- genial.
Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One could
not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of mere
antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it
expelled archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without
seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington with a
new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and in April returned
to Mexico with the Camerons to study the charms of pulque and
Churriguerresque architecture. In May he ran through Europe again with
Hay, as far south as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage. After
thus covering once more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the old
trails, Adams went home in October, with every one else, to elect
McKinley President and to start the world anew.
For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams wept
no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or
historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything he
wanted to save; and in this respect he reflected only the public
mind which balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both
parties as to express no sympathy with either. Even among the most
powerful men of that generation he knew none who had a good word to
say for it. No period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in
American politics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the
balance of American society; but the natural result of such lack of
interest in public affairs, in a small society like that of
Washington, led an idle bystander to depend abjectly on intimacy of
private relation. One dragged one’s self down the long vista of
Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one’s friends, and avoiding
to look at anything else. Thus life had grown narrow with years,
more and more concentrated on the circle of houses round La Fayette
Square, which had no direct or personal share in power except in the
case of Mr. Blaine, whose tumultuous struggle for existence held him
apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House and laid his hand
heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole nest so slowly
constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the world. Adams
found himself alone. John Hay took his orders for London. Rockhill
departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had been buried in Persia.
Cameron refused to remain in public life either at home or abroad, and
broke up his house on the Square. Only the Lodges and Roosevelts
remained, but even they were at once absorbed in the interests of
power. Since 1861, no such social convulsion had occurred.
Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most
strongly the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the
man in the State Department seemed more important than the man in
the White House. Adams knew no one in the United States fit to
manage these matters in the face of a hostile Europe, and had no
candidate to propose; but he was shocked beyond all restraints of
expression to learn that the President meant to put Senator John
Sherman in the State Department in order to make a place for Mr. Hanna
in the Senate. Grant himself had done nothing that seemed so bad as
this to one who had lived long enough to distinguish between the
ways of presidential jobbery, if not between the jobs. John Sherman,
otherwise admirably fitted for the place, a friendly influence for
nearly forty years, was notoriously feeble and quite senile, so that
the intrigue seemed to Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well
as of the State Department. One might have shrugged one’s shoulders
had the President named Mr. Hanna his Secretary of State, for Mr.
Hanna was a man of force if not of experience, and selections much
worse than this had often turned out well enough; but John Sherman
must inevitably and tragically break down.
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 20}
The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the
petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor was the
matter improved by hints that the President might call John Hay to the
Department whenever John Sherman should retire. Indeed, had Hay been
even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, he would have put an
end, once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his
friend’s part; but even without this last disaster, one felt that
Washington had become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there
but solitary contemplation of Mr. McKinley’s ways which were not
likely to be more amusing than the ways of his predecessors; or of
senatorial ways, which offered no novelty of what the French
language expressively calls embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman’s
ways which would surely cause anguish to his friends. Once more, one
must go!
Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing since
the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached the month of
March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years’ dogged effort to
begin a new education, one could not recommend it to the young. The
outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had become more and more
dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the Civil Law had been locked
in its dark closet, as far back as 1860. Noah’s dove had not
searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so
little success. Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove who wants
and finds rest; but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone
and uneducated, who has lost his taste even for olives. To this, also,
the young may be driven, as education, and the lesson fails in
humor; but it may be worth knowing to some of them that the planet
offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week
alone without ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year.
Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that no
man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to
his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him
the task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a
right to require amusement- or at least education, since this costs
nothing to any one- and that a world which cannot educate, will not
amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right to exist than he. Both
views seem sound; but the world wearily objects to be called by
epithets what society always admits in practice; for no one likes to
be told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having
nothing to say in its defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is
pardonable in youth, the man of sixty who wishes consideration had
better hold his tongue. This truth also has the defect of being too
true. The rule holds equally for men of half that age. Only the very
young have the right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding.
Elderly people commonly know enough not to betray themselves.
Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on
one point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in others.
Of all characteristics in human nature, this has been one of the
most abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long history
of human expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid by the
wise, shows that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever
existed on this. “Even a fool,” said the wisest of men, “when he
holdeth his peace, is counted wise,” and still more often, the
wisest of men, when he spoke the highest wisdom, has been counted a
fool. They agreed only on the merits of silence in others. Socrates
made remarks in its favor, which should have struck the Athenians as
new to them; but of late the repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas
Carlyle vociferated his admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it
the best form of expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best
form of expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the
most noble to the end. Alfred de Vigny’s dying wolf remarked:-
–
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 25}
A voir ce que l’on fut sur terre et ce qu’on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse.
–
When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,
Only silence is strong,- all the rest is but lies.
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 30}
–
–
Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have
decided to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm that-
–
The Alp’s snow summit nearer heaven is seen
Than the volcano’s fierce eruptive crest;
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 35}
–
with other verses, to the effect that words are but a “temporary
torturing flame”; of which no one knew more than himself. The evidence
of the poets could not be more emphatic:-
–
Silent, while years engrave the brow!
Silent,- the best are silent now!
{CH_XXIII ^paragraph 40}
–
Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in silence as
a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all
philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, had ever
been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few were believed to
have attained ignorance, which was in result the same. More than this,
in every society worth the name, the man of sixty had been
encouraged to ride this hobby- the Pursuit of Ignorance in Silence- as
though it were the easiest way to get rid of him. In America the
silence was more oppressive than the ignorance; but perhaps
elsewhere the world might still hide some haunt of futilitarian
silence where content reigned- although long search had not revealed
it- and so the pilgrimage began anew!
The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in
London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about
it; education could not be expected there; but there Adams arrived,
April 21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many days, for
Queen Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in St.
James’s Street. True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets of Rome,
actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like
Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a “bloodless fear”;
but in spring London is pleasant, and it was more cheery than ever
in May, 1897, when every one was welcoming the return of life after
the long winter since 1893. One’s fortunes, or one’s friends’
fortunes, were again in flood.
This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one’s self the
oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars
better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled
Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled Venus to show
him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a
sort of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris, and set up a household
at St. Germain where he taught and learned French history for nieces
who swarmed under the venerable cedars of the Pavillon d’Angouleme,
and rode about the green forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly.
From time to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred
to break the summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began
to feel at home in France as in other countries he had thought more
homelike. At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris
because he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hays
came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a stanch and
strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to Egypt.
Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and what
they said had as little to do with education as possible, until one
evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the Nile from
Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to announce the
sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the greatest stride in
education since 1865, but what did it teach? One leant on a fragment
of column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep
down the debris of ruin. The jackal’s ancestors had surely crept up
the same wall when it was building. What was his view about the
value of silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of
the Sphinx. Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between
civilizations was that of trade. Henry wandered, or was
storm-driven, down the coast. He tried to trace out the ancient harbor
of Ephesus. He went over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched
for the harbor of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople
and studied the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of
Justinian. His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode
long enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of
thought along the great highways of exchange.