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PARTISAN REVIEW
life, it can be only because one insists upon Garcin's plea, in Sartre's
play - "on est ce qu'on veut." But it is not clear that Adams really
wanted to be other than what he was or to believe in what his intelli–
gence denied .
Adams's attitude towards the cosmos and towards history was
as deconstructive as his attitude towards consciousness , and his
efforts to suggest form in general may be seen as ironic .
Chartres,
which he thought of subtitling "A Study in Thirteenth Century
Unity," intended to balance the
Education,
"A Study in Twentieth
Century Multiplicity," is often understood as Adams's tribute to a
viewpoint of coherence. But it can be seen as a way of describing
what is only hypothetical, the creation of the human imagination.
His appreciation of the unitary vision only intensified his conviction
that the achievement was essentially esthetic. He regretted, in a way ,
that modern man had become incapable of such performance: "The
worst of it is that we have no imaginative race left to reconstruct a
faith or an art," he wrote his brother Brooks. But he did not stop
regarding the faith and the art as equivalent actions of the mind .
Blackmur recounts, in the present volume, the story of Adams's
late interest in medieval architecture, stained glass, and even in the
music of the medieval
chansons.
His interest in the music had been
aroused by a passage in his grandfather's diary. John Quincy
Adams, defeated for reelection as President, had gone to see the
French opera,
Richard Coeur-de-Lion
by
Gn~try,
and been forcibly
struck by the aria of the minstrel who sings to the King, "0,
Richard! 0, mon Roi!/L'univers t'abandonne ." Blackmur is chiefly
interested in tracing Adams's impulse to go back to the original
Richard and his times and songs, but, clearly, Adams had been
moved by his grandfather's emotion because it expressed an exclu–
sion from politics which in his own case had become absolute . More
important still, the words of the song reflected his personal redefi–
nition of the usual idea of failure . The idea certainly occurred to
Adams that the
universe
had failed to meet his longing for form . For
Adams, facing the twentieth century, God was dead, and the
Virgin, if one had to continue to imagine her, was to be imagined
looking down "from a deserted heaven into an empty church, on a
dead faith.»
Adams says in the
Education
that "from cradle to grave the
problem of running order through chaos, direction through space,
discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always
been and must always be the task of education as it is the moral of
