Volume 13, Number 8 · November 6, 1969
History and Henry Adams: II
By Alfred Kazin
'Adams, you reason too much!' his friend John LaFarge the painter said to him. Mind, restlessly devouring, unsatisfiable mind, mind helplessly descending through the cosmos in search of itself, 'the man-meteor,' was to become his obsession. To 'reason' up and down the stream of time, and in his many travels the face of the globe, was to become Henry Adams's assertion in the face of what he saw everywhere as 'chaos'; 'reason' was to become his style in life. But how should he not reason, and reason inextricably, like all those Protestant heroes of thought in the nineteenth century condemned in a faithless world to argue themselves into some historical certitude? How should he not reason when Lyell and Darwin, Marx and Comte, held out to his eager mind a law of development that always stopped short of his own experience, so that one had to reason beyond all the known confines of history? How should he not continue to reason from history and to make history seem reasonable even in its 'chaos' when the compulsion to reason from sequence was in his pride as an Adams, in his training as an historian, in his cautions as a millionaire, in his physical timidities as an undersized man, in his loneliness and guilt as a husband?
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