Henry Adams and Winslow Homer

Where have we got? We've got to Henry Adams. Henry Adams. We've been following American history in an interesting way through individuals rather than through wars or military campaigns. And by moving in a rather Baconian Shakespearean historical flow we get a little different view from the textbook. We find that if we settle our sense of presence into an individual and become acquainted with their personality and become intuitive about their life fabric that somehow our psychic capacity is able to extend itself across time and across space and occupy another focus. And from the resonances of this succession of focuses various great individuals we've been able to appreciate a very curious development in this country. And we come now to an individual for whom this movement, this progression, this unfolding suddenly became conscious. And he found himself looking back in terms of his own family history and recognizing that his existential physical and mental self was but a mask or a puppet held by this family circumstance and dangled in the face of the unfolding future. And as he recognized that frailty his urge to learn more in terms of widening his context of understanding sharpening his penetration of vision he began slowly to do as James Joyce said that he wished to do. He began to wake up from the nightmare of history and realize the full ramifications of a consciousness free in the universe that was aware of its origins and directions. And not only in terms of the family but finally in terms of the entirety of the civilization that was a part of. And finally in terms of the entirety of the species of which he was a representative of and defined himself on the brink of looking outside of the entire frame of reference. So we have someone who was born in 1838 who presents in his writings quandaries which we still suffer from psychologically in the 1980s qualities whose reverberations on a lower harmonic seem to still shake us in terms of our cultural certainties and whose writings have been largely ignored because they have raised most poignantly and focused most eloquently clear the quandaries which lie there waiting for the intelligence which wakes up from the nightmare of history. So Henry Adams is indeed a very very important individual. I would consider William James and his brother Henry James and Henry Adams to occupy flanges from a central perception that slowly became visible to these high quality spirits late in the 19th century early in the 20th century. James expressing in philosophy and psychology. His brother Henry James expressing in literature. Henry Adams expressing in history. The central realization that if a new kind of man was to be engendered by this country he would have to be able to step outside of the clothing, the context, the home and everything that had been handed to him. And it produced a crisis of consciousness and a crisis of confidence in his willingness to do that. Would you do it if you had a chance? So these are the questions that came up to these individuals. And if you remember last week with William James near the end of his life when he delivered the great series of lectures that were published as A Pluralistic Universe he said that for him the crisis had come down to a decision whether one should crawl back inside of the old logics and take solace in their illusion or whether to put the old useless books down forever and strike out anew and hope that some new relationality could be engendered. And that was the point of the pluralistic universe that James said "for myself I'm willing to set the old books down. They are empty now. They were full ones for others before us. But now I set them down and walk into the future expectant that we will be able to carve out a new world." Henry Adams as we'll see a great contemporary and a lifelong friend of William James, chose to become increasingly the cynical pessimist on the surface and finally withdrawing into silence. But as I will seek to present I think Adams finally resolve for himself that by leaving the trail of evidence in the writings which he was able to manifest during his lifetime that others could follow his trail of evidence and see that it led not to the silence of pessimism but to the accurate eye of someone waiting for a new age to engender itself. That would come at some time in the future and there was no sense in carping at his present age. Remember at the end of his life the First World War was shredding what was left of the world and he knew extremely well that there was no sense in pushing for a new age and a new revelation because it was still down the line by his computation. It would probably not come until the first quarter of the 21st century so that the best part of intelligence for him was to leave an accurate trail of evidence in writings which led right up to the brink of what he called a scientific history for the new consciousness that would come in the United States and then put the pen down and quietly left the scene. Now Adams of course was born into probably the most distinguished political family in the country. His great-great-grandfather had been the second president of the United States John Adams. His grandfather had been the sixth president of the United States John Quincy Adams. His father was a very distinguished man Charles Francis Adams who as we will see was the American ambassador to London during the Civil War, was elected to Congress was even on the presidential ballot several times as a vice presidential candidate in fact in 1872. So that Henry Adams as he says in his own biography, The Education of Henry Adams, simply was born with more cards in his favor than any human being had been for a long long time. He held a stacked deck. All the aces and the rules of the game. The question was was he going to be man enough to use the hand that was dealt to him. And it bothered him all of his life that being given all of these advantages, wealth, fame, tradition, entrances to the great of the world, what would he be able to utilize this lifetime adequately in regard of its potential I think he did as a youngster. He was of course given a normal New England education fine schools tutors background. By the time the Civil War was breaking out, young Adams was taken on by his father Charles when he went to London. The American delegation during the Civil War in London had only three working members. And of course the relationships with England during the Civil War were very very iffy. The untold story of what would have happened if Britain had backed the South is still to be discussed and written. And it was precarious. And it was incidentally due to the personality and intelligence of Henry's father Charles Francis Adams that Britain never committed itself fully for the South. Although there were many factions in the British Parliament who wanted to destroy the up and coming American power before they became too powerful to deal with. There were many factions like that. Charles Francis Adams had to have someone that he could depend upon in the American Embassy in London and he with the great shrewd judgment of a third generation Adams looked at his son Henry and realized that he had someone who was intelligent enough. He was a young whip crack. He was able to get the work done. So he took him with him. And for the duration of the Civil War and three years beyond Henry Adams literally refashioned himself working for his father in the American embassy in London but also re-educating himself in the terms of the great cosmopolitan atmosphere of London of the 1860s so that Henry Adams after this fabulous New England education and background very upper crust had a second upper crust education in London at the best soirees and in the very center of the focus of power so that when he came home at the age of 30 he was probably one of the sharpest ground young men in the United States. His wit, his intelligence, his background, his manners, his capacity to understand relationships and power and so forth. What would he do with this? And when he came back of course New England was far too small for him. New York was far too brusque for him. So he went to the only source of big gain power in the United States. He went to Washington D.C. to sit in and get a front row seat on what was happening in the United States. 1868, he got there just in time to see the ineptness of Andrew Johnson being swept aside he began to realize that the enormous economic energy that had been engendered in the North in the industrial North during the Civil War was still going on and that large corporations and combines that had had their origins before the Civil War but had received these tremendous contracts during the Civil War were still working at high speed and were now turning this energy towards developing the continent. And one of the largest corporations of course was the railroads. And the railroads were teaming up with large investment houses in New York. In fact Henry Adams wrote his first real great Article called The Great New York Gold Conspiracy. And in it he characterized the takeover attempt by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to corner the gold market in the United States which before the Civil War would have been an unheard of audacity. And yet after the Civil War was something which came within a hair's breadth of actually happening. So if the possibilities to Henry Adams for as he called it "the usurers Paradise breeding groups of men who like superior wolves would just take over various indispensable aspects of the American economy and thus by leverage begin to control the country." And of course in the New York Gold Conspiracy, it was printed in October of 1870 and it went like this at the beginning of the Civil War in America with its enormous issues of depreciating currency and its reckless waste of money and credit by the government created a speculative mania such as the United States with all its experience in this respect had never before known. And he goes on then to say that "speculation had assumed the shape of a gambling game known as roulette the rouge et noir. The nation flung itself into the stock exchange until the outsiders as they were called in opposition to the regular brokers of Broad Street." Before Wall Street it was Broad Street. "Represented the entire population of the American Republic. Everyone speculated and for a time successfully. The inevitable reaction began when the government about a year after the close of the war stopped its issues and ceased borrowing. The greenback currency had for a moment sunk to a value of only $0.37 on the dollar. On the worst day of all the 11th of July 1864 one sale of 100,000 in gold was actually made at 3 to 10 equivalent to about $0.33 on the dollar. At that point the depreciation stopped and the paper which had come so near to falling into entire discredit steadily rose in value." So the public had been lured in. He says that "everyone who had an extra $10 had immediately turned it over to stockbrokers and these stockbrokers had turned it over to larger pools until everyone had lost sight of what they were doing with their money." And all of this was on speculation and investment. And it was all based on a future dynamic of growth and profit so that the railroads especially became the focus, the leading carrot for all these brokers to follow. So those individuals who were controlling the course of development of the railroads began to have an inside leverage on the nature of the stock market itself, on the currency and on the gold backing it. And two young sharp individuals, totally different personalities, Jay Gould who Henry Adams describes as a man who liked like a spider to spin webs in the dark to catch you and Jim Fisk who was always chomping on some cigar and stepping on someone's toes teamed up together and almost cornered the market on gold. Anyway Adams in this great perceptive article suddenly was the bright young critic on the scene and with his background and with his name he was a real personage in Washington. Well he stayed in Washington for a couple of years and he began to stylize himself as somewhat of an eccentric. In fact in his biography The Education of Henry Adams he wrote about himself as if he were another person. He had a chapter which was called Eccentricity and there's a paragraph from it. I think we should introduce the opening paragraph. Very very interesting. "Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education. But several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris such a habit stood in one's way. In America it roused all the instincts of native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided eccentric systematically unsystematic and logically illogical. The less one knew of it the better." So Adams himself began to think of himself as an oddball, someone who was capable of simply punching holes into almost any situation. So he began to be a character around town. I had been educated in the best finishing school so very very quickly. Adams began to be known as the best dancer in Washington D.C. he was invited to all the parties partly because of his name partly because people wanted to be reviewed by Adams and some of the articles or letters that he was writing. And as a matter of fact some of the bright young individuals in Washington D.C. one of them I think we should single out was John Hay. John Hay became a great friend and favorite of Henry Adams. Hay had been brought to Washington by Lincoln. Hay was from Illinois and an extraordinarily likable intelligent individual. There was an apocryphal story that Lincoln's personal secretary asked him the last ten minutes that they were boarding the train to go to Washington for the first inauguration he said "We've got to take this young man along." And Lincoln said "We can't take everybody in Illinois." And the man said "but this young man is the man who has been writing your campaign material and promoting you." And Lincoln said, "well maybe we better take him along practically." So young John he had been taken there. A tremendous intellect. And so he and Adams became really good friends and were seen all over the place. Adams began writing some material for the North American Review and in fact was offered the editorship of the North American Review almost immediately at 31. Adams was probably one of the most viably intelligent men in Washington. And what made him more attractive is that he didn't seem to have any ambition for office so it made it easy to have someone like this around. You didn't have to fear if you were a politician that he was going to climb over your back and have your office next year. But Adams had been bitten by the bug of traveling and he decided that he was going to go back to Europe for another sashay. And in fact many times during his life like William James he would be off traveling to Europe. The next real important era in Adams life came when he was married. He had found himself admiring the manner of a young girl that he said wasn't particularly beautiful but she seemed to have a style of life that was like his own and he began to appreciate the merits of having a daily companion. And so he married Marion Hooper who became Marion Adams. And they were just a great team together. Their life together seemed to be like crossed fingers. It was charmed. It was excellent. And they quickly set up house there in Washington, D.C. and pretty soon they were living at 1607 H Street in Washington, D.C. where they had a beautiful view out the Potomac and down to the monuments - of the Jefferson and the Washington monuments. And everybody in town seemed to love Henry Adams and Marion Adams. In fact they were invited to the White House quite often to dine with President Hayes. Hayes had come in after the travesty of Grant. Henry Adams used Grant as a whipping board for the whole of his administration. He characterized Grant. He said Grant was the man who publicly declaimed that Venice would be a beautiful city if they would drain it. He said this is the kind of mentality that he manifested. He said certain things about his cigars and the quality of his background which we better not repeat here. But Grant seemed to be the epitome to Henry Adams as just the chaotic individual who rises from time to time in American society and unfortunately seems to take over things for a while. I think though that we should mention that as Adams and his wife settled down, Adams began to think of himself really as a more serious writer than just a journalist, just someone who is writing for the magazines. And he hadn't yet got his vision. He hadn't got his forte. So he took his hand at writing what he thought would be a supercilious novel and he called it simply Democracy. And unbelievably to him it became an instant bestseller and everyone in Washington was reading it and trying to find themselves in the novel and trying to discuss who they had found in the novel. And pretty soon Henry Adams found himself absolutely famous because people had found out that it was he who had written it and didn't the Adams' know it all anyway. The first paragraph of Democracy is sufficient for us for reasons which many persons thought ridiculous. "Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health but she said that the climate would do her good. In New York she had troops of friends but she suddenly became eager to see again the very small number of those who lived on the Potomac. It was only her two, her closest intimates that she honestly acknowledged herself to be tortured by ennui. Since her husband's death five years before she had lost her taste for New York society. She had felt no interest in the price of stocks, very little in the men who dealt in them. She had become serious. What was it all worth this wilderness of men and women as monotonous as the brownstone houses they lived in. In her despair she had resorted to desperate measures. She had begun to read philosophy in the original German and the more she read the more she was disheartened. So that so much culture should lead to nothing. After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very literary transcendental commissioner merchant she could not see that her time had been better employed than when in former days she had passed it flirting with a very agreeable young stockbroker. Indeed there was an evident proof to the contrary for the flirtation might lead to something. In fact had led to a marriage while the philosophy could lead to nothing unless it were perhaps to another evening of the same kind. So she moved to Washington." Well Henry was absolutely aghast that this little puffball that he had blown out on the wind had been successful. He did another one called Esther which was even more esoteric and even more well-liked. I think the last time Esther was reprinted I think it was reprinted just once. Somebody did a scholarly edition in 1938 for a university. But Adams quickly set aside the idea of being a novelist and he began to search around to find a theme for himself for his energies. A focus. A windfall came to him. He was given all of the personal papers from locked compartments of a man named Albert Gallatin. Now Gallatin had been the secretary of treasury under Thomas Jefferson. And Gallatin had been a real confidant of Thomas Jefferson. And as Adams began to pore over all these papers he had to do the editing of all these papers and write a biography of the man which he did. Came out in four big volumes. Life and three volumes of annotated papers. But as he reviewed Gallatin and his position on the United States, the economic affairs, it began to occur to him and in fact I think rather visions of his own ancestral individuals began to flash in his psyche. He began to see with more and more clarity that Thomas Jefferson was the real pivotal figure in the United States and that it was not the American Revolution of 1776 that had formed the American character and country but it was the revolution of 1800. And the more that this idea got ahold of Henry Adams' imagination and began to flesh out terms of the reams and reams of facts from Gallatin's work in the Jefferson administration the more Henry Adams began to consider in his spirit of doing an enormous work a complete history of the Jefferson years. And as of course he looked into the fact he realized that it was not just the two administrations of Jefferson but it was also the two administrations of Madison after Jefferson that had to be considered. Madison had been Jefferson's secretary of state and he and Gallatin of course very very close. But every time there was a major decision that Madison would and would take he would be consulting with Jefferson. So that really that period of 16 years was all big time. And as Adams saw, this began to envision in his mind that the entire nature of the United States had been misunderstood. That they had been laboring under a myth of the revolution of 1776 and that the formative elements of the American spirit had been laid some 24 years later. So he began working on this. After he finished the Gallatin works he began to work on what eventually was published as a nine volume history, The History of the United States and the Administrations of Jefferson and Adams and Madison. There was a two volume abridgment which I own which I have which I'll take a look at with you in just a little bit, but it's almost no one that you find now who has read through it. There are very few of us who have actually gone into it and read it. But again and again as one reads through the last pages the enormity of these volumes in and out, in and out, one sees this quality of practical visionariness which Henry Adams had. Unlike a mystic who seems to see in a poetic metaphorical image he saw in terms of mass practical detail. The more of it the better and the clearer his conviction that this was the way to express his vision. So that in these volumes as he was working on them Adams began to not only find his own inner coordination and development but he began to realize that his place in terms of the history was to be the herald for this age which had been started way back there and had not ever come to fruition because it had not ever had its day in court in terms of history since that time. As he was working on this Adams suffered a shock when his wife Marion who had been quite ill with various debilitating illnesses committed suicide in December of 1885 and it seemed to just take the steam out of Adams. He was beside himself. He had loved her dearly. They had never been separated for a single night during their years of marriage and he wrote in one of his letters that he had experienced all of the joys of life and now was convinced that he had experienced the worst tragedy that could befall a human heart or consciousness and fell silent. It was in this condition that a very very good friend of his the great American artist John La Farge who was very famous as a muralist. The Church of the Ascension in New York City has these huge murals by La Farge. He did many other things, wrote many art books and so forth. La Farge who was three years older than Henry Adams, a great friend of his, decided that what he needed was to get completely outside of the situation that he was normally in. So instead of taking him off to Europe or taking him to the mountains he took him to Japan. And so in 1886 John La Farge and Henry Adams boarded a train went all the way out to California caught a ship made their way all the way across the Pacific to Japan. Landed in Yokohama. Japan was a great culture shock for both La Farge and Adams in the sense that they found themselves immediately at home and they found themselves, as Adams says in one of his letters, "absolutely sympathetic with the Asian cast of mind." And they spent time in Yokohama. They spent time in Tokyo. And when the weather got too hot they moved north to Nikko up in the northern part of Honshu, Honshu island. And later on they would take travels around to Osaka and Kyoto. So they really saw Japan and they were there for months. And when they went there of course being Henry Adams he was introduced to any American of any note who was there. And they stayed with Ernest Fenollosa for a while for instance, the great art critic. Henry Adams had a feeling about Fenollosa. I guess I should read a letter. He thought that Fenollosa was a little bit pretentious. And he wrote this letter from Nikko, Japan to his friend John Hay, 24th of July 1886, "Yesterday arrived from Osaka. A large lot of kimonos sent up by the great curio dealer Yamanaka. I gleaned about two dozen out of the lot. They are cheap enough but I fear that Fenollosa who is in Tokyo will say that they are Tokugawa rat and will bully me into letting them go. He is now trying to prevent my having a collection of Hokusai's books. He is a kind of Saint Dominic and holds himself responsible for the dissemination of useless knowledge by others. My historical indifference to everything but facts and my delight at studying what is hopefully to based and degraded shocked his moral sense. I wish if you were here to help us trample on him. He has joined a Buddhist sect. I myself was a Buddhist when I left America but he single handedly has converted me to Calvinism with leanings towards the Methodists." The tongue of Henry Adams is a cure, a tonic. Japan opened him up and one gets a sense of certain biographers of Adams say "Well he got his otherworldly pessimism from being in Japan and so forth." Rubbish. Absolutely nothing to it. His powers of perception, his need to take himself out of a situation which had been literally suddenly squeezed dry of meaning and to find himself in another culture totally different and filled with impressions began to enlarge his sensibility of what human nature was really all about. And he began to sense that his preoccupation with being an Adams was after all very small in terms of the entire world. His preoccupation with what was going to happen to this country was in fact very peculiar when one considered whole vast civilizations and their movement. And so Japan literally took the blinders off Adams. And he realized that urbane and cultivated as he had been he was nothing but a small dusty provincial from this new country in North America and had no sense of the real enormity of world history and universal flows. So he began to devote himself to studying these capacities. Now his great history of the Jefferson and Madison years was published. He had come back after a year and a half in Japan. And he had come back through. As a matter of fact he went through most of Asia, Singapore and so forth. But he wasn't impressed by them as much as he would have been if you had gone there first. But when he came back the great volumes began to come out two at a time. Two in 1890 early to late in 1892. Early in 1891 and three volumes late in 1891 so that almost every six months there were these tomes coming out on the market. And pretty soon he found himself being offered a magnificent professorship. Now he had been a professor at Harvard for a while for a few years but this time they wanted to give him one of these extraordinary medals of achievement and so forth and Adams just wouldn't have it. He said I have a dozen friends who have works as equally great as mine. He had a friend who had done a ten volume biography of Lincoln. He said here take Nicolay's volumes or take John Hay or somebody like this but don't pick on me. The Adams' have had enough medals from this country. One sense is in it not just the quote pessimist trying to stay inside of his shell but really this grander sense of world humor and humility. That he had suddenly seen that the horizons extend way way way beyond what he thought was the original landscape. And he was trying to be true to that new heart and that new vision that he wasn't after the accolades of his country or even the accolades of his time. He was after an understanding, a penetration into what it meant to be a human being. After all, when the Great Histories had been published, and Adams was finally seen as an individual, probably one of the great historians of the time, he sent in a private letter to a friend of his a very interesting poem in verse called Buddha and Brahma and it was sent as a matter of fact to Hay and it wasn't published until much later. I think it was about 1915 or so. It was published in the Yale Review years later when Adams was already just a silent recluse in Washington, DC. The first little paragraph in a very long poem. Very interesting. This is an American descendant of two presidents in the 1880s writing something like this. "The Buddha known to men by many names. Siddhartha Shakyamuni Blessed One sat in the forest as had bent his wont these many years since he attained perfection in silent thought abstraction purity. His eyes fixed on the lotus in his hand. He meditated on the perfect life. While his disciples sitting round him waited his words of teaching every syllable more and more precious as the master gently warned them. How near was come his day of parting in silence. As the master gave example they meditated on the path and law." And then he goes on and a question comes up by one of the disciples and he says teach us if such be in the perfect way whether the world exists eternally. And of course it's one of those great seminal questions. All this is history. Is life a temporary fleeting phenomenon? Is there some scale of understanding within which it is but like a shadow or a cloud? Or does it in the broadest vast vistas of comprehension through the divine eye? Does it have an actuality and a resonance which we can accept as here and valuable and excellent? And this was a question that was the center of Henry Adams poem Buddha and Brahman. The only other long poem that he did and it was done within a few years of that and it's interesting to juxtapose them was A Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres. So he did a poem on the Buddha and he did a prayer on the Virgin of Chartres. And it's interesting. Here's the beginning of that "Gracious lady. Simple as when I asked your aid before. Humble is when I prayed for grace in vain. 700 years ago. Weak weary sore in heart and hope. I ask your help again. You who remember all. Remember me An English scholar of a Norman name. I was a thousand who crossed the sea to wrangle in the Paris schools for fame. When your Byzantine portal was still young I prayed there with my master Abelard. When Ave Maria Stella was first sung I helped to sing it here with Saint Bernard." Which was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. What Adams was saying obviously was that his sense of being had begun to include past lives, previous lives and that he had become in a sense attenuated to the fact that at some past in his particular flow as a reincarnating spirit he had seen a vision of equanimity and experienced it in himself and that it had not just been for himself as an individual flowing spirit coming in and out of life again but that it had been some focal point some moment of clarity for the entirety of Western civilization. And so Adams in a way began like a great hermetic hunter to try and find his way. Where was that and as he searched his way he realized that the focal point had been for him around the year 1150 at Chartres Cathedral. And we'll see when we take a look at his great book on Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres that he would return to the very spot under the very window, the very seat and sit down there again and see it all over again. So this wonderful A Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres and this wonderful hymn to the Buddha were written very very close to the time that he finished this great history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. So we have working within this single sensitivity an enormous interplay of forces and understandings. How close are we to nine? Are we at a, let's stop there and then we'll have a break and then go on from there. I think in terms of Adams a great history of Jefferson that I might refer you if I may in all humility to the cassette of the lecture I did on Jefferson. A lot of the insights and digested visions of Jefferson were presented there. Not so much that I'm just echoing Adams but a lot of the individual insights that I have found over the last 20 years of really being serious about looking into these events and characteristics I find echoed and shared with Adams and of course with William James last week too. As a matter of fact if we could sometime do an American History course on just the period focusing in depth on William James and Henry Adams and John Dewey and Frank Lloyd Wright the four of them as two pairs of comrades bridging all the time from Jefferson right up to the present we would see a very interesting kind of an interplay that happens in this country. Not to belabor the point, but I think that if the more that you take a look at the United States the more it is a very very strange synchronistic set of circumstances. We don't have a national history. We have rather an unfolding pattern which I think if any of you are really interested in some of the more occult aspects of it Mr. Hall has done a number of articles and books. The Secret Destiny of America would probably be one that you should take a look at and read. And we will see with Henry Adams that one of the last things that he wrote on the rule of phase applied to history. He singles out the figure of Sir Francis Bacon as being that individual who epitomized in his lifetime in his place in history in his quality as a philosopher in the universal sense, a change of pitch in the tone of Western man's mind so that we have been operating with a whole different modulation of thought that the forms of thought since Bacon's time have changed decidedly and produced what we have seen in contemporary history and especially in terms of this country. So that the United States very very metaphysical phenomenon very difficult to see. It's interesting just to refresh a few statistics and figures because I think it will come up in just a few minutes. Again he began his great history with a few statements of fact which still ring as unbelievable to us. He said, wrote according to the census of 1800, the United States of America contained 5,308,000 people, 5 million people. The working population of adult males was somewhere around 1 million so that the entirety of the making of this country as it has come down was on the backs of less than the population of a major city in Henry Adams time. But that the country had literally exploded from that very very small frail skeleton to the enormous unfolding process. Remember he was writing it in, it was published in 1890 1891. And he will say that if one looks at the terms of the power and control which those million people had in 1800 and then you look at the United States in 1890 you see that we haven't just increased but the exponential explosion has become asymptotic in terms of the increase of capacity and power and control. And he will end his great book, his last essay on the phase of history, show that famous asymptotic curve that from 1400 to 1500, 1600, 1700 to 1800 to 1900 there is a rising curve that goes off the graph about the time of the 21st century so that having done this enormous work having comprehended it and been able to express it and put it out Adams found himself still a middle aged man capable of doing things. Where would he go? What would he do? He took the proverbial couple of trips with friends but he wasn't satisfied. And he wrote in one of his letters he said my experience in Japan keeps coming back to me and I have considered for a long time that Japan is but an antechamber to the Royal Mansion of China. If I could go to China he said there I think I could finally experience what I need to in terms of large universal revelations. Well it was impractical to go to China. He was unable. But his friend La Farge who was doing some very fantastic murals at the time said look there is a place that we could go to. Why not go to the South Seas? Let's go to Hawaii and let's veer off and let's go to the Samoan Islands, Tahiti and so forth, and take a look down there at Polynesian civilization. So Adams and La Farge got together four years after they had arrived back from Japan and went off again, went off through the Sandwich Islands as they were called at that time and arrived at Samoa which was then still very very unspoiled. Civilization in the form of the missionaries or the commercial people had not reached Samoa and the Samoans were fantastic and after having ascertained that La Farge and Adams were not missionaries were not commercial people they opened up and in fact they adopted them into the tribe. They performed the old family dances, the women bare breasted dancing before them and the chiefs laying out the best foodstuffs. And they began to show them the enjoyment of the great Polynesian life. And of course Polynesian society was the one society in world history where men and women were absolutely equal. They held property equally. They were kings or queens equally. They were able to enter into marriages equally or divorce equally. There was no discrimination on the basis of male or female. So Adams and La Farge began to experience a tremendous sense of giddiness, cultural giddiness that they had at last found some place on earth where they felt that they were exposed to what man might have been primordially, Garden of Eden stuff, back to the beginnings. And his letters, far from being pessimistic, seemed very interesting to me. He writes from an island Eva in Savai'i. 26th of October 1890 to a friend Elizabeth Campbell. He writes, "The feast at Santa Paula having been disposed of, the floor was cleared and the Siva began. It differed little from Simano Siva in Apua as far as the scene was concerned but in other ways the difference was great except Lilofee no woman danced all the dancers were men and among them Saipaia took the chief's part. I tried hard to imagine his performances but without much success. Some of the figures were interesting and in some cases the dance became actually acting and in its way amusing. But it is hard to keep up a mere historical interest in jumping and making faces. Lilofee was splendid. Something like a titanic cow such as Zeus had a fancy for but her style was rather that of calm indifference that of action. And as a dancer her motions and poses were rather languid. A bar or so behind time. They kept it up till midnight and we might have gone on all night in which case we would have had the wilder and more undressed performances that are no longer given in missionary circles. But we were tired and so were the dancers. So we broke up at 12. The moon was superb and La Farge and I strolled on the beach watching the wonderful combinations of clouds, calm sea, white beach all running into each other. And as though a watercolor artist of unlimited capacity had painted the scene with careful exclusion of all apparent difficulties. La Farge is fond of describing the peculiarity of the Polynesian world in this way. Sky, sea, and land are all judicious watercolors toned with one general purplish wash with the most exquisitely delicate gradations but never running into violent contrasts. Even the whites have an infinite gradation of violence when contrasted with the dead white of a ship or a house. And then we went for a swim in the ocean. We spent a long time, several months there and then went on to Tahiti." And they found that Tahiti had been contacted many many times by the commercial and missionary forces. In fact many of the Tahitian persons had had European educations so they began to get new insight into the transition and so forth altogether. La Farge and Adams spent almost an entire year roaming around while they were on Tahiti. There was a recluse and his wife living making a hut of their own up on a mountain - Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife. And Adams was shocked at Stevenson because Stevenson being a natural born bohemian frequently quote "went native" in a big way and would appear looking more savage than the natives. And as luck would have it he usually would appear having just fallen in the mud or something and would be all disheveled and wonderful. Henry Adams who could appreciate primordial man didn't have much confidence in a European, especially a Scotsman, who managed to look so disheveled all the time. And as a matter of fact just a few weeks before Adams and La Farge left Tahiti another European, a Frenchman, arrived on the scene, Paul Gauguin. So the island was populated with artists and recluses and so forth and of course all the Tahitians. A great time was had by all and I hope someday someone writes a play set in that scene. That would be quite a cast of characters. The exposure to Japan, the exposure to the South Sea culture seemed like fresh air blowing in Adams mind and capacities. And so there began to be born in him along with these very deep philosophic questions about history and man's nature and his place a concomitant breadth of vision. And as this breadth of vision began to manifest itself more and more in his life, Adams found that his insight qualities we would say psychically or metaphysically he would say in terms of rationality and insight his capacity to single himself out more and more as a reverberation of a pattern that had manifested itself many times before began to lead him back to France to the Normandy area. And he was touring around and it seemed that he had been there off and on for 40 years. And but this time the great spires of the cathedrals of the churches began to call out to him as nature will do when you're ready to see her. And he began to find himself magnetically drawn to musing and thinking upon these vast spires and to realize that the Gothic cathedral had been a manifestation of a great cultural wave of religious manifestation some 700 years before. He recalled the moments of having written the Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres and in the same humble questing mode to put himself in the quest and leave the circumstances open to what pattern may manifest. He found his way to the seacoast of Normandy and there the great granite mountain capped with the monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel suddenly called out to him that this was it. This was one end of a strand of meaning the other end which he would find very very very quickly after that. And he wrote in his great book on Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres because Chartres was the other end of that string of meaning. One of the most famous first sentences I think in English literature he wrote. "The archangel loved heights standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church. Wings up spread. Sword uplifted. Devil crawling beneath. And the cock symbol of eternal vigilance perched on his mailed foot. Saint Michael held the place of his own in heaven and on earth which seems in the 11th century to have to leave hardly room for the Virgin of the crypt and still less for the Christ of the 13th century. At Amiens the Archangel stands for church and state, both militant. He is the conqueror of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God. His place was where the danger was greatest. Therefore you find him here for the same reason he was while the pagan danger lasted. The last patron of Saint Francis the last patron saint of France. So the Normans when they were converted to Christianity put themselves under his powerful protection. So he stood for centuries on his mount in peril of the sea watching across the tremor of the immense ocean." And then he gives us the Latin phrase immense tremor oceanic. And because this is an archetypal spiritual revelatory sound barrier as it were this mysterious tremendous that comes when one breaks through from one time space element to another this immense ocean and its tremor immensely tremor oceanic as Louis the 11th inspired for once to poetry inscribed on the collar of the Order of Saint Michael which he created so that the phrase became the motto of the Order of Saint Michael for the patrons of the cathedrals. So soldiers nobles and monarchs went on pilgrimage to his shrine. So the common people followed and still follow like ourselves. And so with that realization that he had found the one end with the Archangel Michael the Church militant the protector the power he found his way to the other end to Chartres to the kindliness to the church of the great Lady. And he wrote, "Over the left door is an ascension bearing the same stamp. And over the right door the seated Virgin with her crown and her two attendant archangels an empress. Here is the church, the way and the life of the 12th century that we have undertaken to feel if not to understand. First comes the central doorway and above it is the glory of Christ as the church at Chartres understood Christ in the year 1150. For the glories of Christ were many and the Chartres Christ is one. Whatever Christ may have been in other churches here on this portal he offers himself to his flock as the herald of salvation alone among all the imagery of these three doorways. There is no hint of fear punishment or damnation. This is the note of the whole time before 1200. The church seems not to have felt the need of appalling habitually terrorist images. The promise of hope and happiness was enough. Even the portal at Autun which displays a Last Judgment belonged to Saint Lazarus. The proof and symbol of the Resurrection. A hundred years later every church portal showed Christ not as Savior but as judge and he's presided over as the Last Judgment. Many many others. But here at short Christ is identified with his mother. The spirit of love and grace in his church is the Church Triumphant. A whole different tone from Michael." A few pages later Adams in his way moves closer in to the understanding. "Perhaps Our Lady of Chartres was known to be peculiarly gracious and gentle. And this may partially account also for the extreme popularity of her shrine. But whatever the reason her church was clearly intended to show only this side of her nature and to impress it on her son. You can see in the grave and gracious face and attitude of the Christ raising his hand to bless you as you enter his kingdom. In the array of long figures which line the entrance to greet you as you pass in the expression of majesty and mercy of the Virgin herself on her throne above the southern doorway. Never once are you regarded as a possible rebel or traitor or a stranger to be treated with suspicion or as a child to be impressed by fear. Never once. This idea is very different from that which was the object of our pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel. But since all art is to be one long comment upon it you can lay the history of the matter on a shelf for study at your leisure if you ever care to study and to weary details of human illusions and disappointments. While here we pray to the Virgin and absorb ourselves in the art which is your pleasure and which shall not teach either a moral or a useful lesson. The Empress Mary is receiving you at her portal. Whether you are an impertinent child or a foolish old peasant woman or an insolent prince or a more insolent tourist, she receives you with the same dignity. In fact she probably sees very little difference between." And so he moves on and as he moves into Chartres as an architectural monument and as he moves back in time to where it was there he begins to focus on the quality of the experience which he is reliving and expressing for any reader who comes to that point in the text. And the book itself then begins to be like a Gothic space able to focus aspiration to a high point of insight which will thrust it free into a sky of understanding. And so he moves closer and closer to that. "The Queen Mother Mary was as majestic as you like. She was absolute. She could be stern. She was not above being angry but she was still a woman who loved grace beauty ornament her toilette robes jewels who considered the arrangements of her palace with attention and liked both light and color who kept a keen eye on her court and exacted prompt and willing obedience from king and archbishops as well as from beggars and drunken priests. She protected her friends and punished her enemies. She required space beyond what was known in the courts of kings because she was liable at all times to have perhaps 10,000 people begging for her favors most inconsistent with law and deaf to refusal. She was extremely sensitive to neglect to disagreeable impressions to want of intelligence in her surroundings. She was the greatest artist as she was the greatest philosopher and musician and theologist that ever lived on earth except her son who at heart is still an infant under her guardianship. Her taste was infallible her sentence eternally final. This church was built for her in this spirit of simple minded practical utilitarian faith. In this singleness of thought exactly as a little girl sets up a dollhouse for her favorite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to your dolls you are out of place here. If you can go back to them and get rid for one small hour of the weight of custom then you shall see Chartres at glory in its play." And having reached that he brings us to this. "Upon my word you may sit here forever imagining such appeals, the endless discussions and criticisms that were heard every day under these vaults 700 years ago that the Virgin answered the questions as my firm belief just as it is my conviction that she did not answer them elsewhere. One who sees her personal presence on every side anyone can feel it who will only consent to feel like a child sitting here on any Sunday afternoon while the voices of the children and the mattress are chanting in the choir. Your mind held in the grasp of the strong lines and shadows of the architecture. Your eyes flooded with the autumnal tones of the glass. Your ears drowned with the purity of the voices. One sense reacting upon another until sensation reaches the limits of its range. You or any other lost soul could, if you cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human, ready to reveal a sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible and would bring the Virgin to life again. In all the depth of feeling which she shows here in lines, vault, chapels, colors, legends, chants, more eloquent than the prayer book, more beautiful than the autumn sunlight, and anyone willing to try could feel it like the child reading new thought without end into the art. He has studied a hundred times but what is still more convincing he could at will in an instant shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive of his own." Having brought us to that, Adams, in a great chapter near the balance point of the book, the chapter called The Court of the Queen of Heaven, ends it with a paragraph that brings Adams' cold eye to the present. "It was very childlike very foolish very beautiful and very true as art at least so true that everything else shades off into vulgarity as you see the Persephone on a Syracusan coin shade off into the vulgarity of a Roman emperor as though the heaven that lies about us in our infancy too quickly takes colors that are not so much sober as sordid and would be welcome if no worse than that. While Geraghty too has feeling and its expression in art has truth and even pathos. But we shall have time enough in our lives for that and all the more because when we rise from our knees now we have finished our pilgrimage, we have done with it for 700 years Chartres has seen pilgrims coming and going more or less like us and will perhaps see them for another 700 years. But we shall see it no more. It can safely leave the Virgin in Her Majesty with her three great prophets on either hand as calm and confident in their own strength and in God's providence as they were when Saint Louis was born. But looking down from a deserted heaven into an empty church on a dead faith." And so Adams brings not only the capacity to have seen but to have expressed this tremendous religious revelation and to held it in his hand and thrown it away. Well unbelievable shock upon shock. What was going on Adams was, see, that in his own time the realities that had manifested had come down, freeze dried as a poet once said in our time that they were incapable of being engendered because there was no longer a context or a society or a culture or a civilization that would treasure them and nourish them and keep them alive day after day that they would be seen more and more as like surreal moments that one would have and then question one's sanity or one's capacity to relate to a daily life that after all this must just be fairy tale stuff or this must be medieval stuff or this must be daydream stuff. And the workaday world, tomorrow morning will soon enough grind it out of you. This was the sort of context and this was the sort of problem that began to bother Adams tremendously so that after he wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and he thought for himself that he would write two more books to try and bring the reason for the dismemberment of this tremendous human unity that had actually existed that could be proved to have existed not only by the architecture that was still there but because we have the capacity to remember those lives when we were helping build those very things enjoying those very visions could go back and have them again but would have to go there to have them would have to go back to have them work in the sense of a daily life because something had happened to civilization something had happened to history that had changed. He was able to write the one sequel to Mont-Saint-Michel which was his great The Education of Henry Adams which he took from his birth all the way up to the moment when he wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and left it off because he couldn't take it further because he had run against one of those limits of intelligence, limits of capacity that you do from time to time. He had found that he had grabbed hold of the tail of the dragon of the problem of our time, the problem of final belief, and he couldn't let go and he couldn't solve it. So he began to work on the third book which he never lived to complete which would have been a discussion of the scientific nature of history that somehow we had moved from a place of divine unity to a place where it was considered now a childish dream at best a surrealistic hopelessness at worst. How did we get here? How and what forces were at work in history to have thrown the reincarnated descendants of those builders of Chartres into this incredible polarized milieu? He only lived to write an article called A Rule of Phase Applied to History, and it was published in 1910. One of the Last Things by Henry Adams other than letters that was published - and his brother Brooks Adams later would fill it out by writing several books - The Law of Civilization and Decay was a major work. So A Rule of Phase Applied to History was Henry Adams' final attempt before he fell into silence, before he broke the pencil as Faulkner will say and said I cannot do any more. I have gone as far as my intelligence and talent can take me. In A Rule of Phase Applied to History, he wrote that, the common idea of phase is that of the solution itself and he used a chemical analogy, salt dissolved into water. The common idea of phase is that the solution itself is when salt is dissolved in water. It is the whole equilibrium or state of apparent rest. So it's a phase. It's an equilibrium. It's a stage at which there is some basic rest and harmony. And to move it from that stage or that phase to another requires a force of energy. And of course with like salt and water there are the phases of the solid and the liquid or fluid or there could be even the vapor of the gas. Then Adams, in his article, on A Rule of Phase Applied to History says that actually this hierarchy, when seen in terms of a more complex solution like human history, there are actually seven phases. And he went on to describe the solid as the first, the fluid is the second, the vapor is the third, and the fourth electricity, which he writes, wrote, "which is not within the range of any sense when set in motion." Another form of the same phase is magnetism. And some psychologists have tried to bring animal consciousness or thought into relation with electromagnetism which could be very convenient for scientific purposes. But there was a fifth phase, the ether. The ether endowed with qualities which are not so much substantial or material, as they are concepts of thought self-contradictions and an experience. And then there was a sixth phase, space. Space knowable only as a concept of extension, a thought, a mathematical field of speculation, and yet almost the only concrete certainty of man's consciousness, space can be conceived as a phase of potential strains or disturbances of equilibrium but whether studied a static substance or substance in motion it must be endowed with an infinite possibility of strain that which is infinitely formless must produce form. That which is only intelligible as a thought must have a power of self-induction or disturbance that can generate motion. And then there was a seventh, an ultimate. Finally the last phase in history, conceivable, is that which lies beyond motion altogether as hyperspace. Knowable only as hyper thought or perhaps a pure mathematics which whether a subjective idea or an objective theme is the only phase that man can certainly know and about which he can be sure whether he can know it from more than one side or otherwise than as his own self-consciousness or whether he can ever reach higher phases by developing higher powers is a matter for mathematicians to decide. But after even reducing it to pure negation it must still possess in the abstractions of ultimate and infinite equilibrium the capacity for self disturbance. It cannot be absolutely dead. So that with this he began to work on a mathematics of scientific history and he began to say that the forces in history like pressure in the physical chemical sense is replaced by attraction, and temperature is replaced by acceleration. Volume is still a volume and the solvent is the current of thought. So that's the current of thought. That is the solution of history out of which the various phases of its manifestation are generated. And he wrote that no phase comparison wonder with the mere fact of our own existence. And this wonder has so completely exhausted the powers of thought that mankind except in a few laboratories has ceased to wonder or even to think. The Egyptians had infinite reason to bow down before a beetle. We have as much reason as they for we know no more about it. But we have learned to accept our beetle phase and to recognize that everything animate or inanimate spiritual or material exists in phase. That all is equilibrium more or less unstable and that our whole vision is limited to the bare possibility of calculating in mathematical form the degree of a given instability. This results, thus results the plain assurance that the future of thought, and therefore of history, lies in the hands of the physicists and that the future historian must seek his education in the world of mathematical physics. Then came in and he retraces Western history. And then comes the sentence: "Anyone reviewing our history who reads then a half dozen pages of Descartes or Bacon sees that these great reformers expressly aimed at changing the form of thought not just what you're thinking of but the very form out of which thought thinks." And later on near the end of his article he shows that thought has a curvature pattern and that in the various phases of it one can trace its motion and that in fact one sees that just before you reach the limits and find a return back, as he would call it, a degradation of an ideal one finds this explosion an exponential. And then it is that he says the world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900 but measured by any standard known to science, horsepower, calories, volts, mass, in any shape, tension, vibration, so-called progression of society was fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than 1800. The force had doubled ten times over and the speed when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy approached infinity and had annihilated both space and time. No law of material movement applied to it. Some such result was to be expected. Nature is not so simple as to obey only one law or to apply necessarily a law of material mass to immaterial substance. The result proves only that. For instance, the comet, in an example, is material and that thought is less material. And the figure serves the physicist only to introduce the problem so that he brings us to his prognostication. Nothing whatever is beyond the range of possibility. But even if the life of the previous phase 1600 to 1900 were extended another hundred years, the difference to the last term of the series, the mathematical series which he had worked out, would be negligible, in that case the phase would last until about 2025. The mere fact that society should think in such terms or in a higher mathematics might mean little or much. According to the phase rule it lived from remote ages in terms of fetish force and passed from that into terms of mechanical force which led again to terms of electrical force without fairly realizing what had happened except in slow social and political revolutions thought in terms of ether means only thought in terms of itself or in other words pure mathematics and pure metaphysics, a stage often reached by individuals but rarely by history itself and so the final published work of Henry Adams, who had begun as one of the most famous political family in American history, in 1838 is a nice little baby in Massachusetts, ends up putting us on the threshold of the revolution in nuclear physics. And when Adams died in 1918, Europe was still grinding itself up in the First World War. The experiments with Einstein and various other mathematicians had progressed quite far along but Henry Adams's finger on the problem was a little too poignant for American historians and so they habitually leave him out or leave him in truncated little assignments because he in fact raises very aptly as one can see all the great questions which really do trouble us. Well next week we'll take a look at one of the greatest writers since Bacon, Shakespeare - William Faulkner - and the way in which Faulkner having been born in the old America the rural Southern America which was still familiar to people like Henry James and their childhood woke up to this new world and tried to find some way in which to express man's spirit in terms of nuclear physics, energies, cosmic speeds, history's unraveling and as he said he gave it a good try. And we'll see. I think he did. So that's next week.