Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 291future. He failed, however, to find one that satisfied him, although, as the chapter on
“American Ideals” clearly indicates, he did see American history as a tragic decline
from the noble principles of the founding fathers – and, in particular, Thomas
Jefferson’s belief in human perfectibility – to more materialistic aims. Adams
was intellectually drawn to discoveries in contemporary science, especially the
discovery that physical matter contained its own potential for disintegration. So
was his younger brother, Brooke Adams (1848–1927), who, in his most distin-
guished work The Law of Civilization and Decay (1893), argued from scientific
analogy that any established order always contains the elements of its own decline,
since it will eventually be overcome by economic forces that lead to the establish-
ment of another order. For Henry Adams, as for Brooke, science proved that nature
was without system. “The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos,”
Henry Adams wrote. “In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the
dream of man.” In his attempts to impose order on the flux of his experience, man
was, as he saw it, like a spider snaring the forces of nature that “dance like flies
before the net” of its web. That perception of disorder and entropy was to feed into
later American writing; and it was memorably expressed and explored in his two
major works of personal and cultural exploration.
The first of these, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, is subtitled A Study of
Thirteenth-Century Unity. The book is structured as a tour of medieval France, with
the author acting as an expert guide. Along the route, the two most significant
points of interest, for our guide, are the fortress abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel and
the cathedral at Chartres. And, as Adams takes the reader around them, he considers
the dominant cultural power of the Middle Ages: the Catholic faith, which informed
all aesthetic and intellectual endeavor as well as spiritual and ethical thought. In
particular, he sees the force, the power of “the Queen Mother,” the Virgin as
“absolute” during this period; adoration of the Virgin, he suggests, created a unifying
ideal for the medieval sensibility, an ideal that composed life and art into a fluent
harmony of sex, love, energy, and benevolence. This notion of what Adams calls at
one point “the purity, the beauty, the grace, and the infinite loftiness of Mary’s
nature” is not so much a matter of faith, for Adams himself, as one of comparative
cultural inquiry. He clearly sees faith in the Virgin, during the Middle Ages, as an
agent of order, that “dream of man”: a cohesive cultural force and, as such, in marked
contrast to the disintegrative, dispersive, and essentially destructive tendencies of
his own, contemporary culture. That contrast is developed in his second major
work, The Education of Henry Adams: the contrast is even registered in its subtitle,
A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity.
The Education has the form of an autobiography. Among other things, Adams
describes here his experiences as both student and teacher at Harvard, his impressions
of England when he lived there during the Civil War, and the impact the theories of
Charles Darwin had upon him. But it is no more an autobiography than Mont-
Saint-Michel is a guidebook or a travel journal. Adams remains silent about his
marriage, his wife and her eventual suicide; and he distances author from subject by
describing himself in the third person. The core of the Education, like that ofGGray_c03.indd 291ray_c 03 .indd 291 8 8/1/2011 7:54:24 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 24 AM