“Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.”
O Maria, mater Dei,
Tu, post Deum, summa spei,
Tu dulce refugium;
Tot et tantis irretiti,
Non valemus his reniti
Ne vi nec industria;
Consolatrix miserorum,
Suscitatrix mortuorum,
Mortis rompe retia!
In this valley full of tears,
Nothing softens, nothing cheers,
All is suspected lure;
What safety can we hope for, here,
When even virtue faints for fear
Her victory be not sure!
Within, the flesh a traitor is,
Without, the world encompasses,
A deadly wound to bring.
The foe is greedy for our spoils,
Now clasping us within his coils,
Or hiding now his sting.
We sin, and penalty must pay,
And we are caught, like beasts of prey,
Within the hunter's snares.
Nearest to God! oh Mary Mother!
Hope can reach us from none other,
Sweet refuge from our cares;
We have no strength to struggle longer,
For our bonds are more and stronger
Than our hearts can bear!
You who rest the heavy-laden,
You who lead lost souls to Heaven,
Burst the hunter's snare!
The art of this poetry of love and hope, which marked the mystics,
lay of course in the background of shadows which marked the
cloister. "Inter vania nihil vanius est homine." Man is an
imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God. If ever
modern science achieves a definition of energy, possibly it may
borrow the figure: Energy is the inherent effort of every
multiplicity to become unity. Adam's poetry was an expression of the
effort to reach absorption through love, not through fear; but to do
this thoroughly he had to make real to himself his own nothingness;
most of all, to annihilate pride; for the loftiest soul can
comprehend that an atom,--say, of hydrogen,--which is proud of its
personality, will never merge in a molecule of water. The familiar
verse: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" echoes Adam's
epitaph to this day:--
Haeres peccati, natura filius irae,
Exiliique reus nascitur omnis homo.
Unde superbit homo, cujus conceptio culpa,
Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori?
Heir of sin, by nature son of wrath,
Condemned to exile, every man is born.
Whence is man's pride, whose conception fault,
Birth pain, life labour, and whose death is sure?
Four concluding lines, not by him, express him even better:--
Hic ego qui jaceo, miser et miserabilis Adam,
Unam pro summo munere posco precem.
“A teacher affects eternity.”
The two full Professors of History--Torrey and Gurney,
charming men both--could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's
classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand
years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already
elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be
taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea
was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the
moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had
given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the
Middle Ages.
Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had
tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but
even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as
parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence
stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter
himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the
multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat
with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more
complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies
evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes
of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists,
judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent
and immoral, history had either to be taught as such--or falsified.
Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order to
publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel his
students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by
heart.
“The proper study of mankind is woman.”
CHAPTER XI
THE THREE QUEENS
After worshipping at the shrines of Saint Michael on his Mount and
of the Virgin at Chartres, one may wander far and wide over France,
and seldom feel lost; all later Gothic art comes naturally, and no
new thought disturbs the perfected form. Yet tourists of English
blood and American training are seldom or never quite at home there.
Commonly they feel it only as a stage-decoration. The twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, studied in the pure light of political
economy, are insane. The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers
under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the
eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and
greatest deity of all, the Virgin. Very rarely one lingers, with a
mild sympathy, such as suits the patient student of human error,
willing to be interested in what he cannot understand. Still more
rarely, owing to some revival of archaic instincts, he rediscovers
the woman. This is perhaps the mark of the artist alone, and his
solitary privilege. The rest of us cannot feel; we can only study.
The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since
the time of Adam, it is the most complex and arduous. The study of
Our Lady, as shown by the art of Chartres, leads directly back to
Eve, and lays bare the whole subject of sex.
If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that
Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the
superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study
of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and
especially with queen bees. Precisely where the French man may come
in, on the genealogical tree of parthenogenesis, one hesitates to
say; but certain it is that the French woman, from very early times,
has shown qualities peculiar to herself, and that the French woman
of the Middle Ages was a masculine character. Almost any book which
deals with the social side of the twelfth century has something to
say on this subject, like the following page from M. Garreau's
volume published in 1899, on the "Social State of France during the
Crusades":--
A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the
manners of men and women.
Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
In beginning again, from the starting-point of Sir Isaac
Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in
Washington cared to overstep the school conventions, and the most
distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to
treat such a scheme seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his
rank in science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams
never enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most
distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more accessible,
to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever he wanted
an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley listened with
outward patience to his disputatious questionings; but he too nourished
a scientific passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its
avowal. He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know
nothing between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great
observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists,
he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of
philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers
to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander
past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as
though recognizing their existence, while doubting their
respectability. He generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to
affirm; and early put into Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern
Science," a volume by Judge Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen
years by the schools with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably
meets every revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.
Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be as
ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant
nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough, or was
too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never to direction or
progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it
could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation.
“In peace, competition had become difficult, until the British ship owner cried for war; yet he already felt, without acknowledging it even to himself, that in war he was likely to enjoy little profit or pleasure on the day when the long, low, black hull of the Yankee privateer, with her tapering, bending spars, her long-range guns, and her sharp-faced captain, should appear on the western horizon, and suddenly, at the sight of heavy-lumbering British merchantman, should fling out her white wings of canvas, and fly down on her prey.”
“I was interested in politics, thought I had good speaking abilities. I talked with Mr. Oliver about it and he suggested I go ahead.”
“This is way beyond expectations. Weve got the second best golfer in the state at Aspen High School, and I am really proud of him.”
“I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks Im wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.”
The first serious consciousness of Natures gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Good men do the most harm.
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession — such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents — it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
A new friend is always a miracle...One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.
