Part 11 (2/2)
Infinitely to his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed hi the earliest of all fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under Adae
By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshi+re familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he loved best Like Catherine Olney in ”Northanger Abbey,” he yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior's House, and both these joys were his at Wenlock With companions or without, he never tired of it Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all the historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and Uriconium; or followed the Ro and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roe on a summer afternoon and look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales The peculiar flavor of the scenery has so to do with absence of evolution; it was better ypt: it was felt wherever tieable One's instinct abhors ti sleepily through the summer haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconiuested sequence The Roman road in to the railroad; Uriconium orth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildere far superior to Bridgnorth The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa, or the rass, would have taken him only for another and tamer variety of Welsh thief They would have seen little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the steaht mix up the terms of time as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past,time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triue to the abode of one's earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose na to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose kingdo to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria Life began and ended there Behind that horizon lay only the Caanise of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks froanic existence had been erased
That here, on the Wenlock Edge of ti only frivolous ae as ht in the Severn below, astonished hih he had found Darwin hiood as another For anything he, or any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution out of a thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis To an A whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet Evolution of ed to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the as imes without scientific result La Fontaine and other fabulists her than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:--
”Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme, Que scelerat pour scelerat, Il vaut ht well be! At all events, it did not enter into the problem of Pteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete proof of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis, and that before Pteraspis was eternal void No trace of any vertebrate had been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the shores of Quincy Bay
That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them should be older than evolution itself see; nor could he at all si the sudden back-so creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child In Siluria, he understood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Li Neither in the Limulus nor in the Terebratula, nor in the Cestracion Philippi, any more than in the Pteraspis, could one conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the choice mattered little
Cousinshi+p had lih to fix them When the vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever
Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of ascent or descent to a lower type The vertebrate began in the Ludlow shale, as complete as Adams himself--in soanic evolution: and geology offered no sort of proof that he had ever been anything else Ponder over it as hein the theory of Sir Charles but pure inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one found a watch, one inferred a maker He could detect no more evolution in life since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the Abbey All he could prove was change Coal-power alone asserted evolution--of power--and only by violence could be forced to assert selection of type
All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir Charles it was ical record Sir Charles labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them till the ladly studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform; and Selection that did not select To other Darwinians--except Darwin--Natural Selection seema to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a forious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but when he caht, he felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued e
Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of education As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass close about hirass--or whatever there was to nibble--in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of fishes He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he determined to stop it Never since the days of his Liht thus Their ht was one Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not aed Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and a of history, this attitude had been branded as crie! Society punished it ferociously and justly, in self-defence Mr Adams, the father, looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn froht on enterprises great or s the currents of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience To him, the current of his tiht He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted onat ulti all the sides of every question, looking into every , and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits One had no tih it were cracked and rotten For the young eneration between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution froation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force hih he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million more lives
As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed ht the price he nah one, and he could not foresee that science and society would desert hi it He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded deeply in interest and law This was the result of five or six years in England; a result so British as to be alree
Quite serious about it, he set to work at once While confusing his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who left him his field-compass in token of it, Ada question of specie payments His principles assured him that the honest way to resuht win a na how this task had been done by England, after the classical suspension of 1797-1821 Setting himself to the study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done Time and patience were the remedies
The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and Pteraspis to his principles of geology A mistake about Evolution was not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever the last hope of employment in State Street Six months of patient labor would be throay if he did not publish, and with it his whole sche himself a position as a practical man-of-business If he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had nothing to do with the ists, naturally a hue impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or forgave
With labor and caution hearticle on British Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for choice He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to crush the author; but the audacity of youth is norance The editor accepted both
When the post brought his letter, Adaed for an extension He read it with as ht hiave the neriter literary rank Henceforward he had the freedo those on Pocahontas and Lyell, enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review
Precisely what this rank orth, no one could say; but, for fifty years the North Ae coach which carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved Feriters had ideas which warranted thirty pages of developht they had, the Review alone offered space An article was a small volume which required at least three e Not ood thirty-page article, and practically no one in America read them; but a few score of people, es to extract an idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game--a bluefish or a teal--worth anywhere from fifty cents to five dollars Newspaper writers had their eye on quarterly pickings The circulation of the Review had never exceeded three or four hundred copies, and the Review had never paid its reasonable expenses Yet it stood at the head of Aestion to cheaper workers; it reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was an organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Ada on a New York daily newspaper
With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself what better he could have done On the whole, considering his helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors No one could yet guess which of his contereat world A shrewd prophet in Wall Street an, but hardly on the Rockefellers or William C Whitney or Whitelaw Reid No one would have picked out Williareat statesnorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry Higginson Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry Jae were struggling for a start
Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the century, the thirty-years-old ere starting in the year 1867 could show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor
The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser, and could have chosen no better path
Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the pleasantest He was already old in society, and belonged to the Silurian horizon The Prince of Wales had come Mr Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background therapidly, and the conduct of England during the A that London liked to recall The revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and, for the first ti as an Englishman He had thirty years to wait before he should feel hier Meanwhile even a private secretary could afford to be happy His old education was finished; his new one was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling hi, anxious, tee, with another to follow, and a summer sea between
He made what use he could of it In February, 1868, he was back in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell For another season he wandered on horseback over the caes, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as had become with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of Trevi Roic and solemn as ever, with itsitself as seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley The long ten years of accidental education had changed nothing for him there He knew nowhatever that ible to him, or ot back to London and went through his last season
London had become his vice He loved his haunts, his houses, his habits, and even his hanso into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a straw
He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointain at Liverpool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting, he , but he had no more acquired education than when he first trod the steps of the Adelphi Hotel in Novee, and this holly in years Eaton Hall no longer iination; even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest; he felt no sensation whatever in the ate, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who frequented their country houses; he had beco their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes As far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education, but in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years in London
CHAPTER XVI
THE PRESS (1868)
AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family claovernboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River pier Had they been Tyrian traders of the year BC 1000 landing froalley fresh froer on the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years before The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist, started up an unknown street, in company with the private secretary who had becoes to convey the two parties to the Brevoort House The pursuit was arduous but successful Towards ht they found shelter once more in their native land