Democracy, An American Novel Henry Adams

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1880

Chapter I

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
to 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, and 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 brown stone houses they lived in? In her despair she had resorted to
desperate measures. She had read philosophy in the original German, and the more she
read, the more she was disheartened that so much culture should lead to nothing--nothing.
After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very literary transcendental
commission-merchant, she could not see that her time had been better employed than
when in former days she had passed it in flirting with a very agreeable young stock-
broker; indeed, there was an evident proof to the contrary, for the flirtation might lead to
something--had, in fact, led to marriage; while the philosophy could lead to nothing,
unless it were perhaps to another evening of the same kind, because transcendental
philosophers are mostly elderly men, usually married, and, when engaged in business,
somewhat apt to be sleepy towards evening. Nevertheless Mrs. Lee did her best to turn
her study to practical use. She plunged into philanthropy, visited prisons, inspected
hospitals, read the literature of pauperism and crime, saturated herself with the statistics
of vice, until her mind had nearly lost sight of virtue. At last it rose in rebellion against
her, and she came to the limit of her strength. This path, too, seemed to lead nowhere.
She declared that she had lost the sense of duty, and that, so far as concerned her, all the
paupers and criminals in New York might henceforward rise in their majesty and manage
every railway on the continent. Why should she care? What was the city to her? She
could find nothing in it that seemed to demand salvation. What gave peculiar sanctity to
numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each other, any way more
interesting than one person? What aspiration could she help to put into the mind of this
great million-armed monster that would make it worth her love or respect? Religion? A
thousand powerful churches were doing their best, and she could see no chance for a new
faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet. Ambition? High popular ideals?
Passion for whatever is lofty and pure? The very words irritated her. Was she not herself
devoured by ambition, and was she not now eating her heart out because she could find
no one object worth a sacrifice?

Was it ambition--real ambition--or was it mere restlessness that made Mrs. Lightfoot
Lee so bitter against New York and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston, American life in
general and all life in particular? What did she want? Not social position, for she herself
was an eminently respectable Philadelphian by birth; her father a famous clergyman; and
her husband had been equally irreproachable, a descendant of one branch of the Virginia
Lees, which had drifted to New York in search of fortune, and had found it, or enough of
it to keep the young man there. His widow had her own place in society which no one
disputed. Though not brighter than her neighbours, the world persisted in classing her
among clever women; she had wealth, or at least enough of it to give her all that money
can give by way of pleasure to a sensible woman in an American city; she had her house
and her carriage; she dressed well; her table was good, and her furniture was never
allowed to fall behind the latest standard of decorative art. She had traveled in Europe,
and after several visits, covering some years of time, had returned home, carrying in one
hand, as it were, a green-grey landscape, a remarkably pleasing specimen of Corot, and in
the other some bales of Persian and Syrian rugs and embroideries, Japanese bronzes and
porcelain. With this she declared Europe to be exhausted, and she frankly avowed that
she was American to the tips of her fingers; she neither knew nor greatly cared whether
America or Europe were best to live in; she had no violent love for either, and she had no
objection to abusing both; but she meant to get all that American life had to offer, good or
bad, and to drink it down to the dregs, fully determined that whatever there was in it she
would have, and that whatever could be made out of it she would manufacture. "I know,"
said she, "that America produces petroleum and pigs; I have seen both on the steamers;
and I am told it produces silver and gold. There is choice enough for any woman."

Yet, as has been already said, Mrs. Lee's first experience was not a success. She soon
declared that New York might represent the petroleum or the pigs, but the gold of life
was not to be discovered there by her eyes. Not but that there was variety enough; a
variety of people, occupations, aims, and thoughts; but that all these, after growing to a
certain height, stopped short. They found nothing to hold them up. She knew, more or
less intimately, a dozen men whose fortunes ranged between one million and forty
millions. What did they do with their money? What could they do with it that was
different from what other men did? After all, it is absurd to spend more money than is
enough to satisfy all one's wants; it is vulgar to live in two houses in the same street, and
to drive six horses abreast. Yet, after setting aside a certain income sufficient for all one's
wants, what was to be done with the rest? To let it accumulate was to own one's failure;
Mrs. Lee's great grievance was that it did accumulate, without changing or improving the
quality of its owners. To spend it in charity and public works was doubtless praiseworthy,
but was it wise? Mrs. Lee had read enough political economy and pauper reports to be
nearly convinced that public work should be public duty, and that great benefactions do
harm as well as good. And even supposing it spent on these objects, how could it do more
than increase and perpetuate that same kind of human nature which was her great
grievance? Her New York friends could not meet this question except by falling back
upon their native commonplaces, which she recklessly trampled upon, averring that,
much as she admired the genius of the famous traveler, Mr. Gulliver, she never had been
able, since she became a widow, to accept the Brobdingnagian doctrine that he who made
two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserved better of mankind than
the whole race of politicians. She would not find fault with the philosopher had he
required that the grass should be of an improved quality; "but," said she, "I cannot
honestly pretend that I should be pleased to see two New York men where I now see one;
the idea is too ridiculous; more than one and a half would be fatal to me."

Then came her Boston friends, who suggested that higher education was precisely
what she wanted; she should throw herself into a crusade for universities and art-schools.
Mrs. Lee turned upon them with a sweet smile; "Do you know," said she, "that we have
in New York already the richest university in America, and that its only trouble has
always been that it can get no scholars even by paying for them? Do you want me to go
out into the streets and waylay boys? If the heathen refuse to be converted, can you give
me power over the stake and the sword to compel them to come in? And suppose you
can? Suppose I march all the boys in Fifth Avenue down to the university and have them
all properly taught Greek and Latin, English literature, ethics, and German philosophy.
What then? You do it in Boston. Now tell me honestly what comes of it. I suppose you
have there a brilliant society; numbers of poets, scholars, philosophers, statesmen, all up
and down Beacon Street. Your evenings must be sparkling. Your press must scintillate.
How is it that we New Yorkers never hear of it? We don't go much into your society; but
when we do, it doesn't seem so very much better than our own. You are just like the rest
of us. You grow six inches high, and then you stop. Why will not somebody grow to be a
tree and cast a shadow?"

The average member of New York society, although not unused to this contemptuous
kind of treatment from his leaders, retaliated in his blind, common-sense way. "What
does the woman want?" he said. "Is her head turned with the Tulieries and Marlborough
House? Does she think herself made for a throne? Why does she not lecture for women's
rights? Why not go on the stage? If she cannot be contented like other people, what need
is there for abusing us just because she feels herself no taller than we are? What does she
expect to get from her sharp tongue? What does she know, any way?"

Mrs. Lee certainly knew very little. She had read voraciously and promiscuously one
subject after another. Ruskin and Taine had danced merrily through her mind, hand in
hand with Darwin and Stuart Mill, Gustave Droz and Algernon Swinburne. She had even
laboured over the literature of her own country. She was perhaps, the only woman in
New York who knew something of American history. Certainly she could not have
repeated the list of Presidents in their order, but she knew that the Constitution divided
the government into Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary; she was aware that the
President, the Speaker, and the Chief Justice were important personages, and instinctively
she wondered whether they might not solve her problem; whether they were the shade
trees which she saw in her dreams.

Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent, ambition,--call it what
you will. It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give
him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to
see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the
massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive
power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of
democracy and government. She cared little where her pursuit might lead her, for she put
no extravagant value upon life, having already, as she said, exhausted at least two lives,
and being fairly hardened to insensibility in the process. "To lose a husband and a baby,"
said she, "and keep one's courage and reason, one must become very hard or very soft. I
am now pure steel. You may beat my heart with a trip-hammer and it will beat the trip-
hammer back again."

Perhaps after exhausting the political world she might try again elsewhere; she did
not pretend to say where she might then go, or what she should do; but at present she
meant to see what amusement there might be in politics. Her friends asked what kind of
amusement she expected to find among the illiterate swarm of ordinary people who in
Washington represented constituencies so dreary that in comparison New York was a
New Jerusalem, and Broad Street a grove of Academe. She replied that if Washington
society were so bad as this, she should have gained all she wanted, for it would be a
pleasure to return,--precisely the feeling she longed for. In her own mind, however, she
frowned on the idea of seeking for men. What she wished to see, she thought, was the
clash of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent,
centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and
uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government, and the
machinery of society, at work. What she wanted, was POWER.

Perhaps the force of the engine was a little confused in her mind with that of the
engineer, the power with the men who wielded it. Perhaps the human interest of politics
was after all what really attracted her, and, however strongly she might deny it, the
passion for exercising power, for its own sake, might dazzle and mislead a woman who
had exhausted all the ordinary feminine resources. But why speculate about her motives?
The stage was before her, the curtain was rising, the actors were ready to enter; she had
only to go quietly on among the supernumeraries and see how the play was acted and the
stage effects were produced; how the great tragedians mouthed, and the stage-manager
swore.