THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS
THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS
An Autobiography
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September iQi8
CONTENTS
EDITOR'S PREFACE. By Henry Cabot Lodge vii
PREFACE ix
I. QUINCY (1838-1848) 3
II. BOSTON (1848-1854) 23
III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854) 40
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858) 54
V. BERLIN (1858-1859) 70
VI. ROME (1859-1860) 82
VII. TREASON (1860-1861) 98
VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861) no
IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862) 128
X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862) 145
XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863) 167
XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863) 180
XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864) . . .194
XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866) 208
XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868) 224
XVI. THE PRESS (1868) 237
XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869) 255
XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870) 268
XIX. CHAOS (1870) 284
XX. FAILURE (1871) 299
vi CONTENTS
XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892) 314
XXII. CHICAGO (1893) 33 !
XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898) 346
XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899) 362
XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900) . . . .379
XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901) 391
XXVII. TEUFELSDROCKH (1901) 403
XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902) 416
XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902) 426
XXX. Vis INERTIAE (1903) 436
XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903) 449
XXXII. Vis NOVA (1903-1904) 462
XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904) .... 474
XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904) 489
XXXV. NUNC AGE (1905) 499
INDEX S o 7
EDITOR'S PREFACE
THIS volume, written in 1905 as a sequel to the same author's "Mont-
Saint-Michel and Chartres" was privately printed, to the number of
one hundred copies, in 1906, and sent to the persons interested, for
their assent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was
thus explained at the end of Chapter XXIX :
"Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured
by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting
a unit the point of history when man held the highest idea of him-
self as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led
Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in
Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit
from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without
assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movement
might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting him-
self to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as 'Mont-
Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity.'
From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he
could label: ' The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-
Century Multiplicity? With the help of these two points of relation,
he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, sub-
ject to correction from any one who should know better"
The "Chartres" was finished and privately printed in 1904.. The
"Education" proved to be more difficult. The point on which the
author failed to please himself, and could get no light from readers or
friends, was the usual one of literary form. Probably he saw it in
advance, for he used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was
to complete St. Augustine's "Confessions" but that St. Augustine,
like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he,
like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity
viii EDITOR'S PREFACE
to multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached
his end.
Probably he was, in fact, trying only to work into it his favorite
theory of history, which now fills the last three or four chapters of the
"Education" and he could not satisfy himself with his workmanship.
At all events, he was still pondering over the problem in IQIO, when
he tried to deal with it in another way which might be more intelligible
to students. He printed a small volume called "A Letter to American
Teachers" which he. sent to his associates in the American Historical
Association, hoping to provoke some response. Before he could
satisfy himself even on this minor point, a severe illness in the spring
of 1912 put an end to his literary activity forever.
The matter soon passed beyond his control. In 1913 the Institute
of Architects published the "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres"
Already the "Education" had become almost as well known as the
"Chartres," and was freely quoted by every book whose author re-
quested it. The author could no longer withdraw either volume; he
could no longer rewrite either, and he could not publish that which he
thought unprepared and unfinished, although in his opinion the other
was historically purposeless without its sequel. In the end, he pre-
ferred to leave the "Education" unpublished, avowedly incomplete,
trusting that it might quietly fade from memory. According to his
theory of history as explained in Chapters XXXIII and XXX IF, the
teacher was at best helpless, and, in the immediate future, silence next
to good-temper was the mark of sense. After midsummer, 1914., the
rule was made absolute.
The Massachusetts Historical Society now publishes the "Educa-
tion" as it was printed in 1907, with only such marginal corrections
as the author made, and it does this, not in opposition to the author's
judgment, but only to put both volumes equally within reach of stu-
dents who have occasion to consult them.
HENRY CABOT LODGE
September, 1918
PREFACE
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU began his famous "Confessions" by a
vehement appeal to the Deity: "I have shown myself as I was; con-
temptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was
so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast seen it,
Eternal Father! Collect about me the innumerable swarm of my fel-
lows; let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my unworthi-
ness; let them blush at my meannesses! Let each of them discover his
heart in his turn at the foot of thy throne with the same sincerity; and
then let any one of them tell thee if he dares: 'I was a better man /' "
Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the eight-
eenth century, and has been commonly thought to have had more in-
fluence than any other teacher of his time; but his peculiar method of
improving human nature has not been universally admired. Most
educators of the nineteenth century have declined to show themselves
before their scholars as objects more vile or contemptible than neces-
sary ', and even the humblest teacher hides, if possible, the faults with
which nature has generously embellished us all, as it did Jean Jacques,
thinking, as most religious minds are apt to do, that the Eternal
Father himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under
his eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.
As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent
guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature offers scarcely one
working model for high education. The student must go back, beyond
Jean Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a model even of self-
teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no
one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal expe-
rience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to
discuss it.
As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he
x PREFACE
erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and
largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and,
for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of
education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes.
The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts
the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron 's wants. The tailor's
object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or else-
where, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the
garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork
fitted on their fathers.
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his
teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject
of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is
economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of ob-
stacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the
tools and models may be thrown away.
The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometri-
cal figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of
relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only measure
of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the air of
reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it had life.
Who knows ? Possibly it had !
February 16, 1907
THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS
THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS
CHAPTER I
QUINCY (1838-1848)
UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning Its
back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage
called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon
Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street,
on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below
Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and
christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after
the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.
Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been
more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped
in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as
the century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary
traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds advantage in
being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the safeguards of
an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but some-
times convenient, and if one needs them at all, one is apt to need
them badly. A hundred years earlier, such safeguards as his would
have secured any young man's success; and although in 1838 their
value was not very great compared with what they would have
had in 1738, yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century
career from a nest of associations so colonial so troglodytic
as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John
Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and Quincy, all
4 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so queer
as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after
he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a
child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should
wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth ?
Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at
all, holding such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game
was to be one of which neither he nor any one else back to the
beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He
was not consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken
into the confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told
them to change nothing as far as concerned him. He would have
been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child, born in the
year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest game
of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could
not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the
usual plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though
he had been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would
do it again, the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his
life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and partner
from the moment he was born to the moment he died. Only with
that understanding as a consciously assenting member in full
partnership with the society of his age had his education an
interest to himself or to others.
As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game
at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the
players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise
has no moral and little incident. A story of education seventy
years of it the practical value remains to the end in doubt,
like other values about which men have disputed since the birth
of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never
been stated in dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-
Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre
Dame, every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are
QUINCY 5
moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have man-
aged to carry theirs.
This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as
a vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked
before, to get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age
he puzzled over the question whether, on the doctrine of chances,
he was at liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident.
No such accident had ever happened before in human experience.
For him, alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and
a new one created. He and his eighteenth-century, troglodytic
Boston were suddenly cut apart separated forever in act
if not in sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany
Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay;
and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to
Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were
nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was
six years old; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments
of the old met his eyes.
Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a
yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old
when he took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color.
The second followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3,
1841, he developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as good
as dead, reviving only under the careful nursing of his family.
When he began to recover strength, about January I, 1842, his
hunger must have been stronger than any other pleasure or pain,
for while in after life he retained not the faintest recollection of
his illness, he remembered quite clearly his aunt entering the sick-
room bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple.
The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally
be that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that
the sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
6 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
recollection of the child was that of discomfort. The moment he
could be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from
the little house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents
were to occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring Mount
Vernon Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and
he never forgot his acute distress for want of air under his blankets,
or the noises of moving furniture.
As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in child-
hood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any
fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet
fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character,
though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide
whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success; but this fever
of Henry Adams took greater and greater importance in his eyes,
from the point of view of education, the longer he lived. At first,
the effect was physical. He fell behind his brothers two or three
inches in height, and proportionally in bone and weight. His
character and processes of mind seemed to share in this fining-
down process of scale. He was not good in a fight, and his nerves
were more delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exagger-
ated these weaknesses as he grew older .j The habit of doubt; of
distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment
of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the
hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of re-
sponsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui;
the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society
all these are well-known qualities of New England character in
no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed
to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never
make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character
was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers
were the type; he was the variation./'
As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking
QUINCY 7
life as it was given; accepting its local standards without a diffi-
culty, and enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his
age. He seemed to himself quite normal, and his companions
seemed always to think him so. Whatever was peculiar about
him was education, not character, and came to him, directly and
indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance
which he took with his name.
The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped,
from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political
crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England na-
ture; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resist-
ance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the
world chiefly as >a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to
be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had
wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That
duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys
naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but
the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with
a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure
of hating; his joys were few.
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts
politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of
New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensi-
bility a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it
so that the pleasure of hating one's self if no better victim
offered was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a
true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the
ancients. The violence of the contrast was real and made the
strongest motive of education. The double exterior nature gave
life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town
and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and
thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter
8 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
confinement, school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets,
piled with six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made the
snow sing under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets be-
came dangerous to cross; society of uncles, aunts, and cousins
who expected children to behave themselves, and who were not
always gratified; above all else, winter represented the desire to
escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country,
only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the end-
less delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for no-
thing, and breathed by boys without knowing it.
Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of
more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was
meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among
senses, smell was the strongest smell of hot pine-woods and
sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of
ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of
stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the
marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the
children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from
pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters
of a spelling-book the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on
the boy's tongue v sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color
as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest.
The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens
color. The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was
meant by atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze
of a New England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the
dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea,
as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli
in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples
of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the American
colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies,
were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy
QUINCY g
thaws of Boston winter. With such standards, the Bostonian
could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing.
After a January blizzard, the boy who could look witTTpleasure
into the violent snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its
intense light and shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone.
He could reach it only by education.
Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was
tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or
waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the
bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the
salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries,
or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps,
or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country
were always sensual living, while winter was always compulsory
learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature; winter was
school.
The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry
Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew;
it ran though life, and made the division between its perplexing,
warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with grow-
ing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the
boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter
and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile,
and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a
schoolmaster that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
Though Quincy was but two hours' walk from Beacon Hill, it
belonged in a different world. For two hundred years, every
Adams, from father to son, had lived within sight of State Street,
and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken kindly to
the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited his
double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his great-grand-
father, who had died a dozen years before his own birth : he took
for granted that any great-grandfather of his must have always
io THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
been good, and his enemies wicked; but he divined his great-grand-
father's character from his own. Never for a moment did he con-
nect the two ideas of Boston and John Adams ; they were separate
and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams went with Quincy. He
knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old man of
seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him, but
except that he heard his grandfather always called "the Presi-
dent," and his grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to
suppose that his Adams grandfather differed in character from his
Brooks grandfather who was equally kind and benevolent. He
liked the Adams side best, but for no other reason than that it
reminded him of the country, the summer, and the absence of re-
straint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way inferior to Boston,
and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The reason was
clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy had no Boston
style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life
and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The
flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light
his own fires in the early morning was still on the mantelpiece of
his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or
of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms, water-
supplies, lighting, heating^ and the whole array of domestic com-
forts, were unknown at Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom,
a water-supply, a furnace, and gas. The superiority of Boston
was evident, but a child liked it no better for that.
The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed
the mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The Presi-
dent's place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more
interesting of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in
fashion. It showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked
of colonial age, but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the
end of his life he never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn
QUINCY 1 1
in with his childish breath. He never could compel himself to
care for nineteenth-century style. He was never able to adopt
it, any more than his father or grandfather or great-grandfather
had done. Not that he felt it as particularly hostile, for he recon-
ciled himself to much that was worse; but because, for some remote
reason, he was born an eighteenth-century child. The old house
at Quincy was eighteenth century. What style it had was in its
Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis Seize chairs and sofas.
The panels belonged to an old colonial Vassall who built the house;
the furniture had been brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801
or 1817, along with porcelain and books and much else of old diplo-
matic remnants; and neither of the two eighteenth-century styles
neither English Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize was com-
fortable for a boy, or for any one else. The dark mahogany had
been painted white to suit daily life in winter gloom. Nothing
seemed to favor, for a child's objects, the older forms. On the
contrary, most boys, as well as grown-up people, preferred the
new, with good reason, and the child felt himself distinctly at a
disadvantage for the taste.
Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams
grandfather. Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848.
Both were kind to children, and both belonged rather to the
eighteenth than to the nineteenth centuries. The child knew no
difference between them except that one was associated with
winter and the other with summer; one with Boston, the other
with Quincy. Even with Medford, the association was hardly
easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken to pass a few days
with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became
so violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought
back in disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously
homesick again.
The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses.
12 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Even there the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere
a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or
four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not
enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an
education which he hated. jFrpm cradle to grave this 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
religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a
boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies
in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has
the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his mas-
ter has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his
generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly
terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.
All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his first
serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of
will, In which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy,
but instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting,
left rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected
from a natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint.
He could not have been much more than six years old at the time
seven at the utmost and his mother had taken him to Quincy
for a long stay with the President during the summer. What
became of the rest of the family he quite forgot; but he distinctly
remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in
a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Natur-
ally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what
mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his
mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no
means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical
ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion
by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way
to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the
QUINCY 1 3
bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the Presi-
dent's library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly
came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without
a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to
the town. After the first moments of consternation at this inter-
ference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentle-
man close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a
mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a
boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the
passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, some-
where before reaching the school door. Then and always, the
boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission;
but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical
points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated
inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malev-
olent criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand
and depart.
The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights of
boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him
dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had
this effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind,
the child must have recognized that the President, though a tool
of tyranny, had done his disreputable work with a certain intelli-
gence. He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal feel-
ing, and had made no display of force. Above all, he had held his
tongue. During their long walk he had said nothing; he had
uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience
and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown no concern
in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy's existence.
Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling itself
little about his grandson's iniquities, and much about the iniquities
of President Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age feel the
whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be the
vicarious victim of his own sins, and he gave his grandfather credit
14 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt instinctive re-
spect. .He admitted-force as a form of right; he admitted even
temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would
at that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which
is, as every one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known
in any Puritan land.
Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old President's
relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether
his older brothers and sisters were still more favored he failed to
remember, but he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity
which, when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shocked
him, for it must have sometimes tried the President's patience.
He hung about the library; handled the books; deranged the papers;
ransacked the drawers; searched the old purses and pocket-books
for foreign coins; drew the sword-cane; snapped the travelling-
pistols; upset everything in the corners, and penetrated the
President's dressing-closet where a row of tumblers, inverted on the
shelf, covered caterpillars which were supposed to become moths
or butterflies, but never did. The Madam bore with fortitude the
loss of the tumblers which her husband purloined for these hatch-
eries; but she made protest when he carried off her best cut-glass
bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that he might see the
roots grow, but which, she said, he commonly forgot like the
caterpillars.
At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless they
have been improved off the ground; but his was a restless mind,
and although he took his hobbies seriously and would have been
annoyed had his grandchild asked whether he was bored like an
English duke, he probably cared more for the processes than for
the results, so that his grandson was saddened by the sight and
smell of peaches and pears, the best of their kind, which he brought
up from the garden to rot on his shelves for seed. With the inher-
QUINCY 1 5
ited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, the little boy Henry con-
scientiously brought up to him in his study the finest peaches
he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect. Naturally
he ate more by way of compensation, but the act showed that he
bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it is even possible that
he may have felt a certain self-reproach for his temporary role of
schoolmaster seeing that his own career did not offer proof of
the worldly advantages of docile obedience for there still exists
somewhere a little volume of critically edited Nursery Rhymes
with the boy's name in full written in the President's trembling
hand on the fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible, given to
each child at -birth, with the proper inscription in the President's
hand on the fly-leaf; while their grandfather Brooks supplied the
silver mugs.
So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill,"
five minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view east-
ward over Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his
twelfth year, the child passed his summers there, and his pleasures
of childhood mostly centred in it. Of education he had as yet
little to complain. Country schools were not very serious. Noth-
ing stuck to the mind except home impressions, and the sharpest
were those of kindred children; but as influences that warped a
mind, none compared with the mere effect of the back of the
President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays, in line with
that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years younger,
seemed to children about the same age. Before railways entered
the New England town, every parish church showed half-a-dozen
of these leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat on the main aisle
in the best pews, and had sat there, or in some equivalent dignity,
since the time of St. Augustine, if not since the glacial epoch. It
was unusual for boys to sit behind a President grandfather, and
to read over his head the tablet in memory of a President great-
grandfather, who had "pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred
1 6 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
honor" to secure the independence of his country and so forth;
but boys naturally supposed, without much reasoning, that other
boys had the equivalent of President grandfathers, and that
churches would always go on, with the bald-headed leading citi-
zens on the main aisle, and Presidents or their equivalents on
the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child: " You '11 be
thinkin' you'll be President too!" The casuality of the remark
made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot it.
He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to
him, that there should be a doubt of his being President was a
new idea. What had been would continue to be. He doubted
neither about Presidents nor about Churches, and no one sug-
gested at that time a doubt whether a system of society which
had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams more.
The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but
more decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the
Dutch tiles, looking out on her garden with the box walks, and
seemed a fragile creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a
note or a message, and took distinct pleasure in looking at her
delicate face under what seemed to him very becoming caps. He
liked her refined figure; her gentle voice and manner; her vague
effect of not belonging there, but to Washington or to Europe,
like her furniture, and writing-desk with little glass doors above
and little eighteenth-century volumes in old binding, labelled
"Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More." Try
as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was
her cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that
age, he felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far
from Boston. She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua
Johnson, an American merchant, brother of Governor Thomas
Johnson of Maryland; and Catherine Nuth, of an English family
in London. Driven from England by the Revolutionary War,
Joshua Johnson took his family to Nantes, where they remained
till the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years
QUINCY 1 7
old when brought back to London, and her sense of nationality
must have been confused; but the influence of the Johnsons and
the services of Joshua obtained for him from President Washing-
ton the appointment of Consul in London on the organization of
the Government in 1790. In 1794 President Washington appointed
John Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague. He was twenty-
seven years old when he returned to London, and found the Con-
sul's house a very agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty.
At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling Amer-
icans, either official or other. The Legation was a shifting point,
between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the City,
near the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting that it
proved fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a Rom-
ney portrait, but among her many charms that of being a New
England woman was not one. The defect was serious. Her future
mother-in-law, Abigail, a famous New England woman whose
authority over her turbulent husband, the second President, was
hardly so great as that which she exercised over her son, the sixth
to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be made of
stuff stern enough, or brought up in conditions severe enough,
to suit a New England climate, or to make an efficient wife for
her paragon son, and Abigail was right on that point, as on most
others where sound judgment was involved; but sound judg-
ment is sometimes a source of weakness rather than of force, and
John Quincy already had reason to think that his mother held
sound judgments on the subject of daughters-in-law which human
nature, since the fall of Eve, made Adams helpless to realize.
Being three thousand miles away from his mother, and equally
far in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797, and took
her to Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation.
During three or four exciting years, the young bride lived in
Berlin; whether she was happy or not, whether she was content
or not, whether she was socially successful or not, her descend-
1 8 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ants did not surely know; but in any case she could by no chance
have become educated there for a life in Quincy or Boston. In
1801 the overthrow of the Federalist Party drove her and her
husband to America, and she became at last a member of the
Quincy household, but by that time her children needed all her
attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in
Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband was made Sen-
ator in 1803, and in 1809 was appointed Minister to Russia. She
went with him to St. Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles Francis,
born in 1807; but broken-hearted at having to leave her two older
boys behind. The life at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her;
they were far too poor to shine in that extravagant society; but she
survived it, though her little girl baby did not, and in the winter
of 1814-15, alone with the boy of seven years old, crossed Europe
from St. Petersburg to Paris, in her travelling-carriage, passing
through the armies, and reaching Paris in the Cent Jours after
Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next went to England
as Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of the Regent.
In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and she
lived for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer for
President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miser-
able years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in
1829, she had earned the right to be tired and delicate, but she
still had fifteen years to serve as wife of a Member of the House,
after her husband went back to Congress in 1833. Then it was
that the little Henry, her grandson, first remembered her, from
1843 to 1848, sitting in her panelled room, at breakfast, with her
heavy silver teapot and sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which still
exist somewhere as an heirloom of the modern safety-vault. By
that time she was seventy years old or more, and thoroughly weary
of being beaten about a stormy world. To the boy she seemed
singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old
President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her
Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great
QUINCY
affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian than she
had been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow
of the Tower of London.
Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old husband,
the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of the
coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture. The
boy knew nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the ven-
erable Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe stress and
little pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might
come some of those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations,
those rebellions against law and discipline, which marked more
than one of her descendants; but he might even then have felt
some vague instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit from her
the seeds of the primal sin, the fall from grace, the curse of Abel,
that he was not of pure New England stock, but half exotic. As
a child of Quincy he was not a true Bostonian, but even as a
child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint of Maryland blood.
Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had hardly seen Bos-
ton till he was ten years old, when his parents left him there at
school in 1817, and he never forgot the experience. He was to be
nearly as old as his mother had been in 1845, before he quite ac-
cepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted him.
A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a certain
delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home in
the eighteenth century and should, in proper self-respect, have
rebelled against the standards of the nineteenth. The atmos-
phere of his first ten years must have been very like that of his
grandfather at the same age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle
of Bunker Hill, and even as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill
remained actual. The tone of Boston society was colonial. The
true Bostonian always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty
of English standards; far from concealing it as a weakness, he
was proud of it as his strength. The eighteenth century ruled
2O THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
society long after 1850. Perhaps the boy began to shake it off
rather earlier than most of his mates.
Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather abruptly
with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a
certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and
gathered, from such words as he could catch, that the President,
who happened to be then staying there, on his way to Washing-
ton, had fallen and hurt himself. Then he heard the word paralysis.
After that day he came to associate the word with the figure of
his grandfather, in a tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side
of the spare bedroom fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr.
Parkman or P. P. F. Degrand, on the other side, both dozing.
The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
came on February 21, 1848 and the month of February brought
life and death as a family habit when the eighteenth century,
as an actual and living companion, vanished. If the scene on the
floor of the House, when the old President fell, struck the still
simple-minded American public with a sensation unusually drama-
tic, its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away
with the life of his grandfather, could not be slight. One had to
pay for Revolutionary patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers;
Presidents; diplomats; Queen Anne mahogany and Louis Seize
chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits. Such things warp young life.
Americans commonly believed that they ruined it, and perhaps the
practical common-sense of the American mind judged right.
Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions of
the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its surroundings of
national respect and family pride. By another dramatic chance
it happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Lunt, was an
unusual pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual
type, such as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited
from the old Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined
appearance, his dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his
remarkable English and his fine appreciation, gave to the funeral
QUINCY 2 1
service a character that left an overwhelming impression on the
boy's mind. He was to see many great functions funerals and
festivals in after-life, till his only thought was to see no more,
but he never again witnessed anything nearly so impressive to
him as the last services at Quincy over the body of one President
and the ashes of another.
The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the
boy was taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy.
Like all Mr. Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece of ora-
tory, such as only an admirable orator and scholar could create;
too good for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but al-
ready the boy knew that the dead President could not be in it, and
had even learned why he would have been out of place there; for
knowledge was beginning to come fast. The shadow of the War of
1812 still hung over State Street; the shadow of the Civil War to
come had already begun to darken Faneuil Hall. No rhetoric
could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his subject. How
could he say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians in the heart of
mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark of all the
Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and fifty years
before, had been their inherited quarrel with State Street, which
had again and again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds,
foreign and civil war, wholesale banishments and confiscations,
until the history of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of
Boston? How could he whisper the word Hartford Convention
before the men who had made it? What would have been said had
he suggested the chance of Secession and Civil War?
Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early
Christian. What was he ? where was he going ? IJyen then he felt
that something was wrong, but he concluded that it must be Bos-
ton. Quincy had always been right, for Quincy represented a
moral principle the principle of resistance to Boston. His
22 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Adams ancestors must have been right, since they were always
hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong, Quincy must be
right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came back on the
eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of Duty,
and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and politician. He
could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty
years had in store, and no one could teach him; but sometimes, in
his old age, he wondered and could never decide whether
the most clear and certain knowledge would have helped him.
Supposing he had seen a New York stock-list of 1900, and had
studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal, and steel
would he have quitted his eighteenth-century, his ancestral pre-
judices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and the rest,
in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street, and
ask for the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship
in the Suffolk Bank?
Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages,
looking back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.
CHAPTER II
BOSTON (1848-1854)
PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died
January I, 1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be
the largest estate in Boston, about two million dollars,
to his seven surviving children : four sons Edward, Peter
Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney; three daughters Charlotte,
married to Edward Everett; Ann, married to Nathaniel Frothing-
ham, minister of the First Church; and Abigail Brown, born April
25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to Charles Francis Adams,
hardly a year older than herself. Their first child, born in 1830,
was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnson grand-
mother; the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his
President grandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles
Francis; while the fourth, being of less account, was in a way given
to his mother, who named him Henry Brooks, after a favorite
brother just lost. More followed, but these, being younger, had
nothing to do with the arduous process of educating.
The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but
the family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and
almost wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have
sought long in much larger and older societies for three brothers-
in-law more distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett,
Dr. Frothingham, and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equally
long for seven brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all
bore more or less the stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts
Bay, but the shades of difference amounted to contrasts. Mr.
Everett belonged to Boston hardly more than Mr. Adams. One
of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had broken bounds early
in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a seat in Congress
where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's adminis-
24 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
tration; support which, as a social consequence, led to the mar-
riage of the President's son, Charles Francis, with Mr. Everett's
youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck of parties which
marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many
promising careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but
he had risen with the Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister
to England, and had returned to America with the halo of a Eu-
ropean reputation, and undisputed rank second only to Daniel
Webster as the orator and representative figure of Boston. The
other brother-in-law, Dr. Frothingham, belonged to the same
clerical school, though in manner rather the less clerical of the
two. Neither of them had much in common with Mr. Adams, who
was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father, and by the in-
herited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal rela-
tions were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in win-
ter, and slept through their uncle's sermons, without once think-
ing to ask what the sermons were supposed to mean for them.
For two hundred years the First Church had seen the same little
boys, sleeping more or less soundly under the same or similar con-
ditions, and dimly conscious of the same feuds; but the feuds had
never ceased, and the boys had always grown up to inherit them.
Those of the generation of 1812 had mostly disappeared in 1850;
death had cleared that score; the quarrels of John Adams, and
those of John Quincy Adams were no longer acutely personal;
the game was considered as drawn; and Charles Francis Adams
might then have taken his inherited rights of political leadership
in succession to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors. Be-
tween him and State Street the relation was more natural than
between Edward Everett and State Street; but instead of doing
so, Charles Francis Adams drew himself aloof and renewed the
old war which had already lasted since 1700. He could not help
it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the popular memory,
his son and his only representative could not make terms with
BOSTON 25
the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed all the great
Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams had principles of his
own, as well as inherited, but even his children, who as yet had
no principles, could equally little follow the lead of Mr. Webster
or even of Mr. Seward. They would have lost in consideration
more than they would have gained in patronage. They were
anti-slavery by birth, as their name was Adams and their home
was Quincy. No matter how much they had wished to enter State
Street, they felt that State Street never would trust them, or they
it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must hunger for it in
vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as archangel
with the flaming sword, to order them away from the door.
Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this
among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even
when only ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his heart
was stone, against State Street; his education was warped beyond
recovery in the direction of Puritan politics. Between him and
his patriot grandfather at the same age, the conditions had changed
little. The year 1848 was like enough to the year 1776 to make a
fair parallel. The parallel, as concerned bias of education, was com-
plete when, a few months after the death of John Quincy Adams,
a convention of anti-slavery delegates met at Buffalo to organize
a new party and named candidates for the general election in
November: for President, Martin Van Buren; for Vice-P resident,
Charles Francis Adams.
For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement,
but even apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road
through life, was decisive for twenty years to come. There was
never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as
indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth or any earlier
century, the stamp mattered less because it was standard, and
every one bore it; while men whose lives were to fall in the genera-
tion between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all, to get rid of it, and
26 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
take the stamp that belonged to their time. This was their educa-
tion. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was easy, but the
old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it gave was
forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral
standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He
could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do
with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him,
as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a
character that, in any previous century, would have led him into
the Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the
beginning of time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like
anti-slavery politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a
violence as great as that of a religious war.
Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was chiefly
inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father alone
counted for much. If he were to worry successfully through life's
quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but,
for his father, the channel lay clear, while for himself an unknown
ocean lay beyond. His father's business in life was to get past the
dangers of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds at least. The task
done, he might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage; and
it mattered little ta his success whether they paid it with their
lives wasted on battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost
opportunity. The generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could
do very well with the old forms of education; that which had its
work to do between 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new.
His father's character was therefore the larger part of his educa-
tion, as far as any single person affected it, and for that reason, if
for no other, the son was always a much interested critic of his
father's mind and temper. Long after his death as an old man of
eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good
deal of difference in their points of view. To his son Henry, the
quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures
in the family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis
BOSTON 27
Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever
existed in the^name. For a hundred years, every newspaper
scfiBBlerTTad, with more or less obvious excuse, derided or abused
the older Adamses for want of judgment. They abused Charles
Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted to
assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the
traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for men-
tal poise absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness the
faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was
alone a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged
nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or in-
feriority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even
under great pressure. This unusual poise of judgment and temper,
ripened by age, became the more striking to his son Henry as he
learned to measure the mental faculties themselves, which were
in no way exceptional either for depth or range. Charles Francis
Adams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind was not
bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or imagina-
tive or oratorical still less mathematical; but it worked with
singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mas-
tery of form. Within its range it was a model.
The standards of Boston were high, much affected by the
old clerical self-respect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual
social charm. Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett, Dr. Frothingham,
Dr. Palfrey, President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Bos-
ton ministers of the same school, would have commanded dis-
tinction in any society; but the Adamses had little or no affinity
with the pulpit, and still less with its eccentric offshoots, like
Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the philosophy of Concord.
Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary group, led by Tick-
nor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but Mr.
Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Web-
sterian. Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence,
especially in medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science.
28 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
He stood alone. He had no master hardly even his father. He
had no scholars hardly even his sons.
Almost alone among his Boston contemporaries, he was not
English in feeling or in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of
acute hostility to England had something to do with this family
trait; but in his case it went further and became indifference to
social distinction. Never once in forty years of intimacy did his
son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of the
exceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke
or duchess seemed to be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing
more than a slightly inconvenient presence. This was, it is true,
rather the tone of English society in his time, but Americans were
largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams had every
possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he
did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or
vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity
or self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of
pride !
The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy
Adams, but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied
by mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment.
No one ever charged Charles Francis Adams with this fault. The
critics charged him with just the opposite defect. They called him
cold. No doubt, such perfect poise such intuitive self-adjust-
ment was not maintained by nature without a sacrifice of the
qualities which would have upset it. No doubt, too, that even
his restless-minded, introspective, self-conscious children who
knew him best were much too ignorant of the world and of human
nature to suspect how rare and complete was the model before
their eyes. A coarser instrument would have impressed them more.
Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must neces-
sarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. _ What
the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be
amused. Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not
BOSTON 29
amused by perfect balance. Had Mr. Adams's nature been cold,
he would have followed Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward,
and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of party discipline and self-interest.
Had it been less balanced than it was, he would have gone with
Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr. Edmund Quincy, and
Theodore Parker, into secession. Between the two paths he found
an intermediate one, distinctive and characteristic he set up
a party of his own.
This political party became a chief influence in the education
of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently
affected his character v at the moment when character is plastic.
The group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and
whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street, num-
bered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, Richard H. Dana, and
Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his
clerical education, was to a boy often the most agreeable, for his
talk was lighter and his range wider than that of the others; he
had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take of dinner-table exchange.
Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be clergyman,
professor, or statesman, while, like every other true Bostonian,
he yearned for the ease of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall or the
Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the oppo-
site; he affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff,
vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him better one
found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success
to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the
burden, as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Un-
doubtedly he succeeded, for his mind and will were robust, but
he might have said what his lifelong friend William M. Evarts
used to say: "I pride myself on my success in doing not the things
I like to do, but the things I don't like to do." Dana's ideal of
life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on the front benches
of the House of Commons until he should be promoted to the
woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that should place him
30 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but
he forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his
longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the
four men, Dana was the most marked. Without dogmatism or
self-assertion, he seemed always to be fully in sight, a figure that
completely filled a well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and
his mind worked close to its subject, as a lawyer's should; but
disguise and silence it as he liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth
generation.
In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like
him, but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite dif-
ferent from his three associates altogether out of line. He, too,
adored English standards, but his ambition led him to rival the
career of Edmund Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had
made so brilliant a start, but rather in the steps of Edward Ever-
ett than of Daniel Webster. As an orator he had achieved a
triumph by his oration against war; but Boston admired him
chiefly for his social success in England and on the Continent;
success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo never
acquired by domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and
instinct, felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated
it the more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society
by the passions of politics. He was rarely without a pocket-full
of letters from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having sac-
rificed to principle his social position in America, he clung the
more closely to his foreign attachments. The Free Soil Party
fared ill in Beacon Street. The social arbiters of Boston George
Ticknor and the rest had to admit, however unwillingly, that
the Free Soil leaders could not mingle with the friends and fol-
lowers of Mr. Webster. Sumner was socially ostracized, and so,
for that matter, were Palfrey, Dana, Russell, Adams, and all the
other avowed anti-slavery leaders, but for them it mattered less,
because they had houses and families of their own ; while Sumner
had neither wife nor household, and, though the most socially
BOSTON 3 1
ambitious of all, and the most hungry for what used to be called
polite society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in Bos-
ton. Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, and even in Beacon
Street he could always take refuge in the house of Mr. Lodge, but
few days passed when he did not pass some time in Mount Ver-
non Street. Even with that, his solitude was glacial, and reacted
on his character. He had nothing but himself to think about.
His superiority was, indeed, real and incontestable; he was the
classical ornament of the anti-slavery party; their pride in him
was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.
The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any
older man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation
of Mr. Sumner in the household was far closer than any relation
of blood. None of the uncles approached such intimacy. Sum-
ner was the boy's ideal of greatness; the highest product of na-
ture and art. The only fault of such a model was its superiority
which defied imitation. To the twelve-year-old boy, his father,
Dr. Palfrey, Mr. Dana, were men, more or less like what he him-
self might become; but Mr. Sumner was a different order
heroic.
As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father gave
him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library,
and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his Latin
Grammar and listened to these four gentlemen discussing the
course of anti-slavery politics. The discussions were always seri-
ous; the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously; and they were
habitual because Mr. Adams had undertaken to edit a news-
paper as the organ of these gentlemen, who came to discuss its
policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams was edit-
ing the " Works " of his grandfather John Adams, and made the
boy read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father
sometimes complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and Massa-
chusettensis, Henry had shown very little consciousness of punc-
tuation; but the boy regarded this part of school life only as a
32 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
warning, if he ever grew up to write dull discussions in the news-
papers, to try to be dull in some different way from that of his
great-grandfather. Yet the discussions in the Boston Whig were
carried on in much the same style as those of John Adams and
his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and the
same habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him
for his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no
more from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were
all types of the past.
Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still
directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors,
merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as
though they were clergymen and each profession were a church.
In politics the system required competent expression; it was the
old Ciceronian idea of government by the best that produced the
long line of New England statesmen. They chose men to repre-
sent them because they wanted to be well represented, and they
chose the best they had. Thus Boston chose Daniel Webster, and
Webster took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the cheques raised
for him by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses, Amorys,
Searses, Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to
represent them. Edward Everett held the rank in regular suc-
cession to Webster. Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to
Everett. Charles Sumner aspired to break the succession, but
not the system. The Adamses had never been, for any length of
time, a part of this State succession; they had preferred the
national service, and had won all their distinction outside the
State, but they too had required State support and had com-
monly received it. The little group of men in Mount Vernon
Street were an offshoot of this system; they were statesmen, not
politicians; they guided public opinion, but were little guided by
it.
The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation
in such air. He took for granted that this sort of world, more or
BOSTON 3 3
less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachu-
setts Bay, was the world which he was to fit. Had he known
Europe he would have learned no better. The Paris of Louis Phi-
lippe, Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Rob-
ert Peel, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of
the same upper-class bourgeoisie that felt instinctive cousinship
with the Boston of Ticknor, Prescott, and Motley. Even the
typical grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the real capacity
of the middle class, and who at times thought himself eccentric,
found friendship and alliances in Boston still more in Con-
cord. The system had proved so successful that even Germany
wanted to try it, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class
government was the ideal of human progress.
Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all
Europe to military practices, never for a moment shook the true
faith. No one, except Karl Marx, foresaw radical change. What
announced it? The world was producing sixty or seventy mil-
lion tons of coal, and might be using nearly a million steam-horse-
power, just beginning to make itself felt. All experience since the
creation of man, all divine revelation or human science, con-
spired to deceive and betray a twelve-year-old boy who took for
granted that his ideas, which were alone respectable, would be
alone respected.
Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there
the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure,
because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments
were all she asked Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On
these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and
man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
" Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals nor forts."
34 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the
Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character,
moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about
Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never
excelled. They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on
no doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading
a yirtuous^useful, unselfish lif^ to be sufficient
for salvation. For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts
were waste of thought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had
solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution
yet tried. The problem was worked out.
Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled
the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him
most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught
to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he
believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the
forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was reli-
gion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was
so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment,
and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct
had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in
later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful
emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might
be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent
society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral con-
ditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the
universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself
anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself
that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from
earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to
him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for
in a long life. The faculty of turning away one's eyes as ..one
approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, under
the lead of Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in
BOSTON 35
politics; but in politics a certain number of men did at least pro-
test. In religion and philosophy no .Oil^prptested.^ Such protest
as was made took forms more simple than the silence, like the
deism of Theodore Parker, and of the boy's own cousin Octavius
Frothingham, who distressed his father and scandalized Beacon
Street by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no old prob-
lems, and to raise many new ones. The less aggressive protest of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an old-world point of view,
less serious. It was naif.
The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and
with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract phil-
osophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could
Eaveeen possible in no other country or time, but it became,
almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the chil-
dren grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political
interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from
childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day,
table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The
eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her
brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women.
The oldest son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best
talkers in Boston society, and perhaps the most popular man in
the State, though apt to be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and
Dana could be entertaining when they pleased, and though
Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in hand, he was will-
ing to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to time; while
Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good lis-
tener, and laughed over a witticism till he choked.
By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams
read much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, espe-
cially when it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and
the "Epistles" of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the
youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems ap-
peared, but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray
36 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
for themselves. Both were too modern for tastes founded on
Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon became a desultory
reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly
eighteenth-century historians because his father's library was full
of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the
mentaHndolence of history. So, too, he read shelves of eighteenth-
century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of Words-
worth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined.
Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy read-
ing; but the boy was thirty years old before his education reached
Wordsworth.
This is the story of an education, and the person or persons who
figure in it are supposed to have values only as educators or edu-
cated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
education. Sumncr, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like
Hume, Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their
works; here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very
nearly the average of most boys in physical and mental stature.
The influence was wholly political and literary. His father made
no effort to force his mind, but left him free play, and this was
perhaps best. Only in one way his father rendered him a great
service by trying to teach him French and giving him some idea
of a French accent. Otherwise the family was rather an atmos-
phere than an influence. The boy had a large and overpowering
set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or replicas of the
same type, getting the same education, struggling with the same
problems, and solving the question, or leaving it unsolved much
in the same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted
or what to do for it, but all were conscious that they would like
;to control power in some form; and the same thing could be said
of an ant or an elephant. Their form was tied to politics or liter-
ature. They amounted to one individual with half-a-dozen sides
or facets; their temperaments reacted on each other and made
each child more like the other. This was also education, but in the
BOSTON 37
type, and the Boston or New England type was well enough known.
What no one knew was whether the individual who thought himself
a representative of this type, was fit to deal with life.
As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent chil-
dren, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check,
should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one was strong
enough to control them, least of all their mother, the queen-bee
of the hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burden fell, on whose
strength they all depended, but whose children were much too
self-willed and self-confident to take guidance from her, or from
any one else, unless in the direction they fancied. Father and
mother were about equally helpless. Almost every large family
in those days produced at least one black sheep, and if this genera-
tion of Adamses escaped, it was as much a matter of surprise to
them as to their neighbors. By some happy chance they grew up
to be decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand escaped from
the burning, always looked back with astonishment at their luck.
The fact seemed to prove that they were born, like birds, with a
certain innate balance. Home influences alone never saved the
New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have
helped to ruin him ; and the influences outside of home were nega-
tive. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of
school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred
of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the day-
school of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to
complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because
he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn
by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. His
memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that
his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of
two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not
only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a
good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted
wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.
38 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the pre-
judice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-
days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Per-
haps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was
exceptional. Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence
was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed,
as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools : Mathe-
matics, French, German, and Spanish. With these, he could
master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel
at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help
of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent
work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.
These four tools were necessary to his success in life, but he never
controlled any one of them.
Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less
complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his com-
panions. Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given
him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more
for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-
taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather
prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty
can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's
opinion it was not school.
Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen
were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy
resources for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were
more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and
swim and were sent to dancing-school ; they played a rudimentary
game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat;
still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray
wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural his-
tory if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could
ride across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant.
Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850.
BOSTON 39
For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures,
winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none
of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of
use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth,
century, the source of life, and as they came out Thackeray,,
Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest
they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest
hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a
musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse
at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The
Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches ^
pears. On the whole he learned most then.
CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit
of leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the
world, and if one learned next to nothing, the little one
iid learn needed not to be unlearned. The surface was ready
to take any form that education should cut into it, though Boston,
with singular foresight, rejected the old designs. What sort of
education was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but
hie escaped the evils of other standards by having no standard at
all; and what was true of school was true of society. Boston offered
none that could help outside. Every one now smiles at the bad
taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe the society of the
forties but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-
water between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged
to neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic
nor industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly
as unformed as English boys and girls, but had less means of
acquiring form as they grew older. Women counted for little as
models. Every boy, from the age of seven, fell in love at frequent
intervals with some girl always more or less the same little
girl who had nothing to teach him, or he to teach her, except
rather familiar and provincial manners, until they married and
bore children to repeat the habit. The idea of attaching one's
self to a married woman, or of polishing one's manners to suit the
standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered the mind
of a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his parents.
From women the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing else.
He might not even catch the idea that women had more to give.
The garden of Eden was hardly more primitive.
To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
WASHINGTON 41
darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to
most boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard
must enjoy great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and
Henry Adams had neither; but no boy escaped some contact with
vice of a very low form. Blackguardism came constantly under
boys' eyes, and had the charm of force and freedom and superi-
ority to culture or decency. One might fear it, but no one honestly
despised it. Now and then it asserted itself as education more
roughly than school ever did. One of the commonest boy-games
of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century, was a
game of war on Boston Common. In old days the two hostile
forces were called North-Enders and South-Enders. In 1850 the
North-Enders still survived as a legend, but in practice it was a
battle of the Latin School against all comers, and the Latin School,
for snowball, included all the boys of the West End. Whenever,
on a half-holiday, the weather was soft enough to soften the snow,
the Common was apt to be the scene of a fight, which began in
daylight with the Latin School in force, rushing their opponents
down to Tremont Street, and which generally ended at dark by
the Latin School dwindling in numbers and disappearing. As the
Latin School grew weak, the roughs and young blackguards grew
strong. As long as snowballs were the only weapon, no one was
much hurt, but a stone may be put in a snowball, and in the dark
a stick or a slungshot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a
knife. One afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting. The
boy Henry, following, as his habit was, his bigger brother Charles,
had taken part in the battle, and had felt his courage much de-
pressed by seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson
"Bully Hig," his school name struck by a stone over the
eye, and led off the field bleeding in rather a ghastly manner. As
night came on, the Latin School was steadily forced back to the
Beacon Street Mall where they could retreat no further without
disbanding, and by that time only a small band was left, headed
by two heroes, Savage and Marvin. A dark mass of figures could be
42 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
seen below, making ready for the last rush, and rumor said that
a swarm of blackguards from the slums, led by a grisly terror called
Conky Daniels, with a club and a hideous reputation, was go-
ing to put an end to the Beacon Street cowards forever. Henry
wanted to run away with the others, but his brother was too big
to run away, so they stood still and waited immolation. The dark
mass set up a shout, and rushed forward. The Beacon Street
boys turned and fled up the steps, except Savage and Marvin
and the few champions who would not run. The terrible Conky
Daniels swaggered up, stopped a moment with his body-guard to
swear a few oaths at Marvin, and then swept on and chased the
flyers, leaving the few boys untouched who stood their ground.
The obvious moral taught that blackguards were not so black as
they were painted; but the boy Henry had passed through as much
terror as though he were Turenne or Henri IV, and ten or twelve
years afterwards when these same boys were fighting and falling
on all the battle-fields of Virginia and Maryland, he wondered
whether their education on Boston Common had taught Savage
and Marvin how to die.
If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not
incomplete. The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery
leaders as well as to their followers. Most of them suffered from
it. Mobs were always possible. Henry never happened to be
actually concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was sure
to be on hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he
heard Garrison or Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble.
Wendell Phillips on a platform was a model dangerous for youth.
Theodore Parker in his pulpit was not much safer. Worst of all,
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston the sight
of Court Square packed with bayonets, and his own friends obliged
to line the streets under arms as State militia, in order to return a
negro to slavery wrought frenzy in the brain of a fifteen-year-
old, eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted to miss no
reasonable chance of mischief.
WASHINGTON 43
One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and
the Boston Massacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an eight-
eenth-century politician, and afterwards only a possibility; be-
yond Boston the first step led only further into politics. After
February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all those that, since
1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world. The Madam
stayed in Washington, after her husband's death, and in her
turn was struck by paralysis and bedridden. From time to time
her son Charles, whose affection and sympathy for his mother in
her many tribulations were always pronounced, went on to see
her, and in May, 1850, he took with him his twelve-year-old son.
The journey was meant as education, and as education it served
the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a boy's thought in
1850. He could not remember taking special interest in the rail-
road journey or in New York; with railways and cities he was
familiar enough. His first impression was the novelty of crossing
New York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the
Camden and Amboy Railroad. This was a new world; a sugges-
tion of corruption in the simple habits of American life; a step to
exclusiveness never approached in Boston; but it was amusing.
The boy rather liked it. At Trenton the train set him on board
a steamer which took him to Philadelphia where he smelt other
varieties of town life; then again by boat to Chester, and by train
to Havre de Grace; by boat to Baltimore and thence by rail to
Washington. This was the journey he remembered. The actual
journey may have been quite different, but the actual journey has
no interest for education. The memory was all that mattered; and
what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his lifetime,
was the sudden change that came over the world on entering a
slave State. He took education politically. The mere raggedness
of outline could not have seemed wholly new, for even Boston had
its ragged edges, and the town of Quincy was far from being a
vision of neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seen a
finished landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind.
44 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
The railway, about the size and character of a modern tram,
rambled through unfenced fields and woods, or through village
streets, among a haphazard variety of pigs, cows, and negro babies,
who might all have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the
Southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care.
This was the boy's impression of what slavery caused, and, for
him, was all it taught. Coming down in the early morning from
his bedroom in his grandmother's house still called the Adams
Building in F Street and venturing outside into the air reek-
ing with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found himself
on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering
from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble
columns and fronts of the Post Office and Patent Office which
faced each other in the distance, like white Greek temples in the
abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city. Here and there
low wooden houses were scattered along the streets, as in other
Southern villages, but he was chiefly attracted by an unfinished
square marble shaft, half-a-mile below, and he walked down to
inspect it before breakfast. His aunt drily remarked that, at this
rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she could not
guess having lived always in Washington how little the
sights of Washington had to do with its interest.
The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an under-
standing of himself. The more he was educated, the less he under-
stood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a hor-
j a crime; the sum of all wickedness ! Contact made it only more
repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave
States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious!
He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had
another side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to
do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more;
the sense of atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again;
and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro popu-
lation hung in the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The
WASHINGTON 45
impression was not simple, but the boy liked it: distinctly it re-
mained on his mind as an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy
itself. The want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the loose-
ness, the laziness; the indolent Southern drawl; the pigs in the
streets; the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the
freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed his
Johnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the same way,
but with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance. The soft-
ness of his gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted
with him, did not come from Boston. His aunt was anything
rather than Bostonian. He did not wholly come from Boston
himself... Though Washington belonged to a different world, and
the two worlds could not live together, he was not sure that he
enjoyed the Boston world most. Even at twelve years old he could
see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve hun-
dred, if by accident he should happen to live so long.
His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the Sen-
ate, which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists,
was freely open to visitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled
a pleasant political club. Standing behind the Vice-President's
chair, which is now the Chief Justice's, the boy was presented to
some of the men whose names were great in their day, and as
familiar to him as his own. Clay and Webster and Calhoun were
there still, but with them a Free Soil candidate for the Vice-Presi-
dency had little to do; what struck boys most was their type.
Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as they wore a blue
dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman. The type of
Senator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate,
when in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only
some sixty members, and affecting the airs of courtesy. Its vice
was not so jnuch a vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The
statesman of all periods was apt to be pompous, but even pom-
posity was less offensive than familiarity on the platform as
in the pulpit and Southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was
46 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and childlike in its simple-
mindedness; quite a different thing from the Websterian or Conk-
linian pomposity of the North. The boy felt at ease there, more
at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though his
acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives
went back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly
to him, and seemed to feel so, for they had known his family so-
cially; and, in spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years,
after he ceased to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal
enemies. Decidedly the Senate, pro-slavery though it were,
seemed a friendly world.
This first step in national politics was a little like the walk be-
fore breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a
fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where
even the weeds grew rank. The second step was like the first,
except that it led to the White House. He was taken to see Presi-
dent Taylor. Outside, in a paddock in front, "Old Whitey," the
President's charger, was grazing, as they entered; and inside, the
President was receiving callers as simply as if he were in the pad-
dock too. The President was friendly, and the boy felt no sense of
strangeness that he could ever recall. In fact, what strangeness
should he feel? The families were intimate; so intimate that their
friendliness outlived generations, civil war, and all sorts of rupture.
President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van Buren and the
Free Soil Party. To him, the Adamses might still be of use. As
for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and,
barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more
or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought
he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in
it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President
was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two
in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who,
was the oldest and first in distinction. Revolutionary patriots,
or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about,
WASHINGTON 47,
one could be jPrgsident^ and some very ..shady j
wereTIEeTy to be. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen^ and such
TKings were swarming in every street.
^Evtry one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not.
No sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole
country, one could hardly have met with an admission of respect
for any office or name, unless it were George Washington. That
was to all appearance sincerely respected. People made pil-
grimages to Mount Vernon and made even an effort to build
Washington a monument. The effort had failed, but one still
went to Mount Vernon, although it was no easy trip. Mr. Adams
took the boy there in a carriage and pair, over a road that gave
him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards.
Tojthe^New England i^d, oads, ^schools, clothes, and a clean
facejwere connected as part of the law of order or Bi^ne^system.
Bad roads meant bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was
clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and
slavery was the cause of this road's badness which amounted to
social crime and yet, at the end of the road and product of
the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.
t contradictions as readily as their elders do,
^
or this boy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to
repeat what he was told that George Washington stood alone.
Otherwise this third step in his Washington education would have
been his last. On that line, the problem of progress was not
soluble, whatever the optimists and orators might say or, for
that matter, whatever they might think. George Washington
could not be reached on Boston lines. George Washington was a
primary, or, if Virginians liked it better, an ultimate relation, like
the Pole Star, and amid the endless restless motion of every other
visible point in space, he alone remained steady, in the mind of
Henry Adams, to the end. All the other points shifted their
bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John
Marshall, took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but
48 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Mount Vernqn always remained Hhsr^Jl was, with no pr^dicable
road to reach it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was
only Quincy 111^ a Southern setting. No doubt it was much more
charming, but it was the same eighteenth-century, the same old
furniture, the same old patriot, and the same old President.
The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the
coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms
upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself
in memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine;
he had only enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to
ask himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem that
deduced George Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In
practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set
aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man; but
any attempt to deal with them seriously as education is fatal.
Luckily Charles Francis Adams never preached and was singu-
larly free from cant. He may have had views of his own, but he
let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary fact
that George Washington stood alone.
Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution,
even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than
ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth
century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery
drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The
boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own
ancestors. The Slave ppwer took the -place _of Stuart kings and
Roman popes. Education could go no further in that course, and
ran off into emotion; but, as the boy gradually found his surround-
ings change, and felt himself no longer an isolated atom in a hostile
universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish, he
began to learn the first and easier lessons of practical politics.
Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century statesman-
ship. America and he began, at the same time, to become aware^
of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery.
WASHINGTON 49,
Even at that early moment, a rather slow boy felt dimly conscious
that he might meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile
sixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship
with late nineteenth-century party organization. The first vague
sense of feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in
1851.
The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as
already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster,
had nothing to do with machinery. Websters or Sewards depended
on others for machine work and money on Peter Harveys and
Thurlow Weeds, who spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse,
and asked no reward. Almost without knowing it, the subordin-
ates ousted their employers and created a machine which no one
but themselves could run. In 1850 things had not quite reached
that point. The men who ran the small Free Soil machine were
still modest, though they became famous enough in their own
right, Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame, and the
other managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts
Democrats giving the State to the Democrats and a seat in the
Senate to the Free Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his
statesman friends would have nothing to do, for such a coalition
was in their eyes much like jockeys selling a race. They did not
care to take office as pay for votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats.
Theirs was a correct, not to say noble, position; but, as a matter
of fact, they took the benefit of the sale, for the coalition chose
Charles Sumner as its candidate for the Senate, while George S.
Boutwell was made Governor for the Democrats. This was the
boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one; not that
he troubled himself with moral doubts, but^ that he learned the
nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain IrTwKicIT he was
too good[ tp^ take part, ; but not too good to7M^IPIS^ " ^ ar ^ es
Sumner happened to "Be the partner to receive these stolen goods,
but between his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction,
and, for him, there was none. He entered into no casuistry on the
50 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
matter. His friend was right because his friend, and the boy
shared the glory. The question of education did not rise while the
conflict lasted. Yet every one saw as clearly then as afterwards
that a lesson of some sort must be learned and understood, once
for all The boy might ignore, as a mere historical puzzle, the
question how to deduce George Washington from the sum of all
wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce Charles Sumner
from the sum of political corruption. On that line, too, education
could go no further. Tammany Hall stood at the end of the vista.
Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his object
in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to
anti-slavery principles, and that he did it. Henry Adams could
rise to no such moral elevation. He was only a boy, and his object
in supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Sen-
ator. It was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend
a millionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral
conclusions, except by admitting that he and his father and
Sumner were wrong, and this he was never willing to do, for the
consequences of this admission were worse than those of the other.
Thus, before he was fifteen years old, he had managed to get him-
self into a state of moral confusion from which he never escaped.
As a politician, he was already corrupt, and he never could see
how any practical politician could be less corrupt than himself.
Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice. At
the time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize,
though the press shouted it at him from every corner, and though
the Mount Vernon Street conclave agreed with the press; yet
he could not plead ignorance, and even in the heat of the conflict,
he never cared to defend the coalition. Boy as he was, he knew
enough to know that something was wrong, but his only interest
was the election. Day after day, the General Court balloted;
and the boy haunted the gallery, following the roll-call, and won-
dered what Caleb Gushing meant by calling Mr. Sumner a "one-
eyed abolitionist." Truly the difference in meaning with the phrase
WASHINGTON 5 1
" one-ideaed^ _abolirionist," which was Mr. Cushing's actual ex-
pression, is riot very great, but neither the one nor the other seemed
to describe Mr. Sumner to the boy, who never could have made
the error of classing Garrison and Sumner together, or mistaking
Caleb Cushing's relation to either. Temper ran high at that
moment, while Sumner every day missed his election by only one
or two votes. At last, April 24, 1851, standing among the silent
crowd in the gallery, Henry heard the vote announced which gave
Sumner the needed number. Slipping under the arms of the by-
standers, he ran home as hard as he could, and burst into the dining-
room where Mr. Sumner was seated at table with the family. He
enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that he was elected; it was
probably the proudest moment in the life of either.
The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers
of boys and men in the streets wearing black crape on their arm.
He knew few Free Soil boys in Boston; his acquaintances were
what he called pro-slavery; so he thought proper to tie a bit of
white silk ribbon round his own arm by way of showing that his
friend Mr. Sumner was not wholly alone. This little piece of
bravado passed unnoticed; no one even cuffed his ears; but in
later life he was a little puzzled to decide which symbol was the
more correct. No one then dreamed of four years' war, but every
one dreamed of secession. The symbol for either might well be
matter of doubt.
This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the
political climax. The boy, like a million other American boys, was
a politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing else.
He should have been, like his grandfather, a protege of George
Washington, a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing
to do but look directly ahead, follow orders, and march. On the
contrary, he was not even a Bostonian; he felt himself shut out
of Boston as though he were an exile; he never thought of himself
as a Bostonian; he never looked about him in Boston, as boys
commonly do wherever they are, to select the street they like best,
52 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
the house they want to live in, the^rcfess]on they mean to prac-
tise. t41w&ys Jhe felt himself somewhere else} perhaps in Washing-
ton with its social ease; perhaps in Europe; and he watched with
vague unrest from the Quincy hills the smoke of the Cunard
steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon, and disappearing
every other Saturday or whatever the day might be, as though the
steamers were offering to take him away, which was precisely what
they were doing.
Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at
hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when
Henry Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas
were more than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary, mathe-
matical result of conditions old as history and fixed as fate
invariable sequence in man's experience. The only idea which
would have been quite unreasonable scarcely entered his mind.
This was the thought of going westward and growing up with the
country. That he was not in the least fitted for going West made
no objection whatever, since he was much better fitted than most
of the persons that went. The convincing reason for staying in
the East was that he had there every advantage over the West.
He could not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enor-
mous tribute to Boston and New York. One's position in the East
was the best in the world for every purpose that could offer an
object for going westward. If ever in history men had been able
to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance, the citizens
of the great Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway
systems were already laid out. Neither to a politician nor to a
business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West
promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in
plenty.
At any other moment in human history, this education, includ-
ing its political and literary bias, would have been not only good,
but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men
so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased
WASHINGTON 5 3
with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted.
He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. He
finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault
with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than his
father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had known
at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years later, at
his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twen-
tieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole, the boy of 1854
stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year I. He
found himself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was
clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought,
but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials
like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the
concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American
boy of 1854 stood nearer the year I than to the year 1900. The
education he had received bore little relation to the education he
needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no edu-
cation at all. He knew not even where or how to begin.
CHAPTER IV
HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last
time down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston
Place, and felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy
that this experience was ended. Never before or afterwards in
his life did he close a period so long as four years without some
sensation of loss some sentiment of habit but school was
what in after life he commonly heard his friends denounce as
an intolerable bore. He was born too old for it. The same thing
could be said of most New England boys. Mentally they never
were boys. Their education as men should have begun at ten
years old. They were fully five years more mature than the Eng-
lish or European boy for whom schools were made. For the pur-
poses of future advancement, as afterwards appeared, these first
six years of a possible education were wasted in doing imper-
fectly what might have been done perfectly in one, and in any
case would have had small value. The next regular step was
Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation
after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gor-
hams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them,
as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought him-
self the better for it, custom, social. ties, convenience^ and, .above
all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other edu-
cation would have required a serious effort, but no one took Har-
vard College seriously. All went there because their friends went
there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.
Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they
wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to
HARVARD COLLEGE 55
make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy
had given to the College a character of moderation, balance,
judgment, restraint, what the French called me sure; excellent
traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that
its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but
such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In
effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of
Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical
blank, a mind on which only a^atej-mark had been stamped.
The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief
wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned
in it, teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams de-
bated whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his com-
panions, but, disappointment apart, Harvard College was prob-
ably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It
taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from
bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong
prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready
to receive knowledge.
What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he
got from his mates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing,
a result common enough in education. Yet the College Catalogue
for the years 1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distin-
guished in their time. Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led
it; H. H. Richardson and O. W. Holmes helped to close it. As a
rule the most promising of all die early, and never get their names
into a Dictionary of Contemporaries, which seems to be the only
popular standard of success. Many died in the war. Adams knew
them all, more or less; he felt as much regard, and quite as much
respect for them then, as he did after they won great names and
were objects of a vastly wider respect; but, as help towards edu-
cation, he got nothing whatever from them or they from him
until long after they had left college. Possibly the fault was his,
but one would like to know how many others shared it. Accident
56 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
counts for much in companionship as in marriage. Life offers
perhaps only a score of possible companions, and it is mere chance
whether they meet as early as school or college, but it is more than
a chance that boys brought up together under like conditions
have nothing to give each other. The Class of 1858, to which
Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New
Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace;
free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and pas-
sions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously sceptical; Angu-
larly indifferent to display, Artifice, florid expression, but not hos-
tile to it when it amused them ^distrustful of themselves, but
little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of
their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others;
negative to a degree that in the long run became positive and
triumphant. Not harsh in manners or judgment, rather liberal
and open-minded, they were still as a body the most formidable
critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criti-
cism. They never flattered, seldom praised ; free from vanity, they
were not intolerant of it; but they were objectiveness itself; their
attitude was a law of nature; their judgment beyond appeal,
not an act either of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort of
gravitation.
^This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard
College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this
band of nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but
they had equally little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to
live with, and above the average of students German, French,
English, or what not but chiefly because each individual ap-
peared satisfied to stand alone, j[t seemed a sign of force; yet
to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still
easier when one has no pains.
Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on en-
larging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians
as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some
HARVARD COLLEGE 57
further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the
Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and
in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well
how thin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mor-
tal enmity. One of the Virginians was the son of Colonel Robert
E. Lee, of the Second United States Cavalry; the two others who
seemed instinctively to form a staff for Lee, were town-Virginians
from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came from Cincinnati and
was half Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, Longworth on the mother's
side. For the first time Adams's education brought him in con-
tact with new types and taught him their values. He saw the
New England type measure itself with another, and he was part
of the process.
Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the
eighteenth century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of
the same age. .Roony Lee had changed little from the type of his
grandfather, Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome,
genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he
had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as
his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. .None of the New
Englanders wanted command. For a year, at least, Lee was the
most popular and prominent young man in his class, but then
seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of com-
mand was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was
simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New Eng-
land student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know
how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the rela-
tive complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed
to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost
ground.
The lesson in education was vital to these young men, who,
within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing
their college conclusions. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he
had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual
58 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even con-
ceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very
well without ideas, if one had only the social instinct. Dozens
of eminent statesmen were men of Lee's type, and maintained
themselves well enough in the legislature, but college was a
sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself, though the
Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of neither
were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives; but
the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the
Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst stages,
while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous. When
a Virginian had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief and
substantial whiskey, none of his Northern friends could be sure
that he might not be waiting, round the corner, with a knife or
pistol, to revenge insult by the dry light of delirium tremens; and
when things reached this condition, Lee had to exhaust his au-
thority over his own staff. Lee was a gentleman of the old school,
and, as every one knows, gentlemen of the old school drank al-
most as much as gentlemen of the new school; but this was not
his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence of poli-
tical feeling in those years; he kept his temper and his friends
under control.
Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to
them, by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken
and even warm. At a moment when the immediate future posed
no problem in education so vital as the relative energy and en-
durance of North and South, this momentary contact with South-
ern character was a sort of education for its own sake; but this
was not all. No doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which
tended naturally to self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the
slow conviction that the Southerner, with his slave-owning limi-
tations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life
as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, and
hunting the bos primigenius, and that every quality in which he
HARVARD COLLEGE 59
was strong, made him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that
even in this respect one eighteenth-century type might not differ
deeply from another. Roony Lee had changed little from the Vir-
ginian of a century before; but Adams was himself a good deal
nearer the type of his great-grandfather than to that of a rail-
way superintendent. He was little more fit than the Virginians
to deal with a future America which showed no fancy for the past.
Already Northern society betrayed a preference for economists
over diplomats or soldiers one might even call it a jealousy
against which two eighteenth-century types had little chance to
live, and which they had in common to fear.
Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought
into close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and
Henry Adams, but the chief difference between them as colle-
gians consisted only in their difference of scholarship : Lee was
a total failure; Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt
his failure more sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of
escape by accepting a commission offered him by General Win-
field Scott in the force then being organized against the Mormons.
He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance, which flat-
tered Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could
do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a cer-
tain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.
If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from
his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his pur-
poses, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bot-
tom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not
want to be one in a hundred one per cent of an education. He
regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had
value, and he wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an
average. Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him
back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or
needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meet-
ings by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself
60 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed
mathematics barring the few first scholars, failure was so
nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value,
and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an
accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his educa-
tion failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathe-
matician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he
needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language,
and he never reached the alphabet.
Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing
from the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories
of free-trade and protection, he got little from Political Economy.
He could not afterwards remember to have heard the name of
Karl Marx mentioned, or the title of "Capital." He was equally
ignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his
time who most influenced its thought. The bit of practical teach-
ing he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in
Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged
his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to his
imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the Gla-
cial Period and Palaeontology, which had more influence on his
curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether. The
entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the
work of any four months in after life.
Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have
value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood,
not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which
had no bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias,
if Adams had been capable of finding other amusement, but the
climate kept him steady to desultory and useless reading, till he
had run through libraries of volumes which he forgot even to
their title-pages. Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned
to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his Eng-
lish composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as
HARVARD COLLEGE 61
in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition,
he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best,
warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third oi
his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge oi
their scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion
that his instructors were very nearly right, and when he became
a professor in his turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking
his scholars, he still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was
not far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative
standard because it was the standard of the school.
He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much
affected his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and
stood watching vaguely for a path and a direction. The world
outside seemed large, but the paths that led into it were not many
and lay mostly through Boston, where he did not want to go.
As it happened, by pure chance, the first door of escape that
seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James Russell
Lowell opened it.
Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of Belles-Lettres,
had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back whatever he
found to bring. The literary world then agreed that truth sur-
vived in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Renan,
Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the German
faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of coming
capitalism its money-lenders, its bank direttQrv&adJt&jrail-
way magnates. TEacSeray and Dickens followed JB aba c Jbucratch-
ing and biting the unfortunate middle class with savage ill-tem-
per, much as the middle class had scratched. And Bitten^the
Church and Court for, a hundred years before. The middle class
had the power, and^hdd its coal^and.jraojydl in handout the
satirists and idealists seized the press, and as WejFwere agreed
that the Second Empire was a 'disgrace to France and a danger
to England, they turned to Germany because at that moment
62 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Germany was neither economical Jiorjrmljtaiy, and a hundred
years behind western Europe in the simplicity of its standard.
German thought, method, honesty, and even taste, became the
standards of scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shake-
speare Kant ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious
scholars were obliged to become German, for German thought
was revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not
very enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited
his scholars to join him. Adams was glad to accept the invitation,
rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany, but still
in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he had
made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some
education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, but
at least a path.
Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other
was open to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen
every stage of his coming life, and he would probably have done
worse. The preliminary step was pure gain. James Russell
Lowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valu-
able part of its universities, the habit of allowing students to read
with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and
used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal
contact pleased and flattered him, as_that of older men ought to
flatter and please the young even when they altogether exag-
gerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As
practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Con-
cord faith rather than towards Boston where he properly be-
longed; for Concord, in the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure
light. Adams approached it in much the same spirit as he would
have entered a Gothic Cathedral, for he well knew that the priests
regarded him as only a worm. To the Concord Church all Adamses
were minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or
imagination; little higher than the common scourings of State
HARVARD COLLEGE 63
Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow scope;
and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel un-
certainty about so many matters more important than Adamses
that his mind rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and
he was ready to admit his unworthiness if only he might pene-
trate the shrine. The influence of Harvard College was beginning
to have its effect. He was slipping away from fixed principles;
from Mount Vernon Street; from Quincy; from the eighteenth
century; and his first steps led toward Concord.
He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like
the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained
always an insect, or something much lower a man. It was
surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; per-
haps as Mr. Emerson justly said it was so; in spite of the
long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back into
the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was himself
and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the banker; it
was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did not
lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to him, at
one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowell was
as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy
got no revolutionary thought whatever objective or subjective
as they used to call it but he got good-humored encourage-
ment to do what amused him, which consisted in passing two
years in Europe after finishing the four years of Cambridge.
The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard
College influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could
trace, but he tended towards negation on his own account, as
one side of the New England mind had always done, and even
there he could never feel sure that Harvard College had more
than reflected a weakness. In his opinion the education was not
serious, but in truth hardly any Boston student took it seriously,
64 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
and none of them seemed sure that President Walker himself,
or President Felton after him, took it more seriously than the
students. For them all, the college offered chiefly advantages
vulgarly called social, rather than mental.
Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more,
but he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his so-
cial position would never be questioned. What he needed was a
career in which social position had value. Never in his life would
he have to explain who he was; never would he have need of ac-
quaintance to strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly
some one to show him how to use the acquaintance he cared to
make. He made no acquaintance in college which proved to have
the smallest use in after life. All his Boston friends he knew be-
fore, or would have known in any case, and contact of Bostonian
with Bostonian was the last education these young men needed.
t Cordial and intimate as their college relations were, they all flew
off in different directions the moment they took their degrees.
Harvard College remained a tie, indeed, but a tie little stronger
than Beacon Street and not so strong as State Street. Strangers
might perhaps gain something from the college if they were hard
pressed for social connections. A student like H. H. Richardson,
who came from far away New Orleans, and had his career before
him to chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friend-
ships at college. Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there
that he valued in after life so much as Richardson, but still more
certainly the college relation had little to do with the later friend-
ship. Life^ is _a jiarrow valley^ and the jroads run close-together..
Adams would have' attached himself to Richardson in any case,
as he attached himself to John LaFarge or Augustus St. Gaudens
or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were at Harvard
College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with years,
and certain men with common tastes were bound to come to-
gether. Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a
HARVARD COLLEGE 65
more equal footing with them had he been less ignorant, and had
he not thrown away ten years of early life in acquiring what he
might have acquired in one.
Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative and
in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world
could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the
vices were less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking
though the mere recollection of it made him doubt his own
veracity, so fantastic it seemed in later life may have done no
great or permanent harm; but the habit of looking at life as a
social relation - an affair of society did no good. It culti-
vated 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 lan-
guages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only
to make the college standard permanent through life. The Bos-
tonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he
stuck only to what the college gave him. If parents went on,
generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard Col-
lege for the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an
inferior social type, quite as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for suc-
cess in the next generation.
Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable,
and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the
mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who
liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American nor Euro-
pean, nor even wholly Yankee; his admirers were few, and his
critics many; perhaps his worst weakness was his self-criticism and
self-consciousness; but his ambitions, social or intellectual, were
not necessarily cheap even though they might be negative. Afraid
of serious risks, and still more afraid of personal ridicule, he seldom
66 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
made a great failure of life, and nearly always led a life more or
less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not
succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond im-
provement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition
which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of
the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian
supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.
The College Magazine printed his work, and the College So-
cieties listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were
not; the audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was all the
encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to
receive; grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible
future acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one
cared enough to criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer
from reaching his own limits. He found that he could not be this
or that or the other; always precisely the things he wanted
to be. He had not wit or scope or force. Judges always ranked
him beneatH a rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges
were right. His work seemed to liim thin, commonplace, feeble.
At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that he could not go
on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it, and he found
that he liadveiy Tittle to say at best. Much that he then wrote must
be still in existence in print or manuscript, though he never cared
to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it was in reality just what
he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling for form; an in-
stinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked not even its weakness.
Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition creates it and
at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost
took place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being
chosen as the representative of his class the Class Orator
at the close of their course. This was political as well as literary
success, and precisely the sort of eighteenth-century combination
that fascinated an eighteenth-century boy. The idea lurked in
his mind, at first as a dream, in no way serious or even possible,
HARVARD COLLEGE 67
for he stood outside the number of what were known as popular
men. Year by year, his position seemed to improve, or perhaps
his rivals disappeared, until at last, to his own great astonish-
ment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of the college per-
mitted no active candidacy; he and his rivals had not a word to
say for or against themselves, and he was never even consulted
on the subject; he was not present at any of the proceedings, and
how it happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen,
that one evening on returning from Boston he received notice of
his election, after a very close contest, as Class Orator over the
head of the first scholar, who was undoubtedly a better orator
and a more popular man. In politics the success of the poorer
candidate is common enough, and Henry Adams was a fairly
trained politician, but he never understood how he managed to
defeat not only a more capable but a more popular rival.
To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-
modesty; his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent
canvass, and he knew his rivals and their following as well as he
knew himself. What he did not know, even after four years of
education, was Harvard College. What he could never measure
was the bewildering impersonality of the men, who, at twenty
years old, seemed to set no value either on official or personal
standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men who had lived
together intimately during four of the most impressionable years
of life, and who, not only once but again and again, in different
ways, deliberately, seriously, .dispassionately, chose as their rep-
resentatives precisely those of their companions who seemed least
to represent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals had any
position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of indifference
to the college. Henry Adams never professed the smallest faith in
universities of any 'kind, either as boy or man, nor had he the
faintest admiration for the university graduate, either in Europe
or in America; as a collegian he was only known apart from his
fellows by his habit of standing outside the college; and yet the
68 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
singular fact remained that this commonplace body of young men
chose him repeatedly to express his and their commonplaces.
Secretly, of course, the successful candidate flattered himself
and them with the hope that they might perhaps not be so
commonplace as they thought themselves; but this was only
another proof that all were identical. They saw in him a rep-
resentative the kind of representative they wanted and
he saw in them the most formidable array of judges he could ever
meet, like so many mirrors of himself, an infinite reflection of his
own shortcomings.
All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it
actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if
possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the
sort he was ever to receive. The function of Class Day was, in the
eyes of nine-tenths of the students, altogether the most important
of the college, and the figure of the Orator was the most conspicu-
ous in the function. Unlike the Orators at regular Commence-
ments, the Class Day Orator stood alone, or had only the Poet
for rival. Crowded into the large church, the students, their
families, friends, aunts, uncles and chaperones, attended all the
girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to show their summer
dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for an hour or two, in a
heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an Orator
and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes as their
own experience and their mild censors permitted them to utter.
What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon for-
got to the last word, nor had it the least value for education; but
he naturally, remembered what was said of it. He remembered
especially one of his eminent uncles or relations remarking that,
as the work of so young a man, the oration was singularly wanting
in enthusiasm. The young man always in search of education
asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence _of
enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since, in either case, it was all
that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred young
HARVARD COLLEGE 69
men, whom he was trying to represent, expressed. Another com*
ment threw more light on the effect of the college education. One
of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's "perfect self-pos-
session." Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College gavelioth-
ing else, it gave calm. For four years each student had been
obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew
each other to the last fibre. One had done little but read papers
to Societies, or act comedy in the Hasty Pudding, not to speak of
all sorts of regular exercises, and no audience in future life would
ever be so intimately and terribly intelligent as these. Three-
fourths of the graduates would rather have addressed the Coun-
cil of Trent or the British Parliament than have acted Sir An-
thony Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala audience of the
Hasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Har-
vard College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so
that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms
of terror before the public which often overcame the graduates
of European universities. Whether this was, or was not, educa-
tion, Henry Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up be-
fore any audience in America or Europe, with nerves rather
steadier for the excitement, but whether he should ever have any-
thing to say, remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing.
Education had not begun.
CHAPTER V
BERLIN (1858-1859)
A FOURTH child has the strength of his weakness. Be-
ing of no great value, he may throw himself away if he
likes, and never be missed. Charles Francis Adams, the
father, felt no love for Europe, which, as he and all the world
agreed, unfitted Americans for America. A captious critic might
have replied that all the success he or his father or his grandfather
achieved was chiefly due to the field that Europe gave them, and
it was more than likely that without the help of Europe they
would have all remained local politicians or lawyers, like their
neighbors, to the end. Strictly followed, the rule would have
obliged them never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, sojmud^more
timid are parents for their children than for themselves, that Mr.
and Mrs. Adams would have been content to see their children
remain forever in Mount Vernon Street, unexposed to the tempta-
tions of Europe, could they have relied on the moral influences of
Boston itself. Although the parents little knew what took place
under their eyes, even the mothers saw enough to make them
uneasy. Perhaps their dread of vice, haunting past and present,
worried them less than their dread of daughters-in-law or sons-in-
law who might not fit into the somewhat narrow quarters of home.
On all sides were risks, Every year some young person alarmed
the parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations
of Europe were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston
might be imperative. The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe; he
seemed well behaved, when any one was looking at him; he ob-
served conventions, when he could not escape them; he was never
quarrelsome, towards a superior; his morals were apparently good,
and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be bad.
Above all, he was timid and showed a certain sense of self-respect,
BERLIN 71
when in public view. What he was at heart, no one could say;
least of all himself; but he was probably human, and no worse than
some others. Therefore, when he presented to an exceedingly
indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a German
university the study of the Civil Law although neither he nor
they knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying
it the parents dutifully consented, and walked with him down
to the railway-station at Quincy to bid him good-bye, with a smile
which he almost thought a tear.
Whether the boy deserved such indulgence, or was worth it, he
knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College;
but whether worthy or not, he began his third or fourth attempt
at education in November, 1858, by sailing on tte steamer Persia,
the pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; the newest,
largest and fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several
of his college companions sailed with him, and the world looked
cheerful enough until, on the third day, the world as far as
concerned the young man ran into a heavy storm. He learned
then a lesson that stood by him better than any university teach-
ing ever did the meaning of a November gale on the mid-
Atlantic which, for mere physical misery, passed endurance.
The subject offered him material for none but serious treatment;
he could never see the humor of sea-sickness; but it united itself
with a great variety of other impressions which made the first
month of travel altogether the rapidest school of education he had
yet found. The stride in knowledge seemed gigantic. One began
at last to see that a great many impressions were needed to make
a very little education, but how many could be crowded into one
day without making any education at all, became the pons asinorum
of tourist mathematics. How many would turn out to be wrong,
or whether any could turn out right, was ultimate wisdom.
The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R.
James, the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday
morning in a furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the
72 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
drearier picture of a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi
coffee-room in November murk, followed instantly by the passion-
ate delights of Chester and the romance of red-sandstone archi-
tecture. Millions of Americans have felt this succession of emo-
tions. Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists feel them still,
but in days before tourists, when the romance was a reality, not
a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boys went out to
Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens would have
felt in the presence of a Duke. The very name of Grosvenor struck
a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with
their gilded furniture; the portraits; the terraces; the gardens,
the landscape; the sense of superiority in the England of the
fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart, above Americans
and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was the England of
Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Hell lurked in every churchyard
shadow, not as shadow but alive. Even Charles the First was
not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see his army defeated.
Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he lost his
battle and his head. An eighteenth-century American boy fresh
from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused
at this sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.
Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham
and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more
to be rightly felt. /The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the
sense of unknown norror in this w^rdjgloom which then existed
nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic
craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impene-
trable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as
one emerged the revelation of an unknown society of the pit
made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl
Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later
the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much
more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic
free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. ^The Black District was a
BERLIN 73
practical education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The
boy ran away from it, as he ran away from everything he ^ disliked.
"Triad he known ^enough to Know where to begin he would have
seen something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the
long, muddy, dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as
his dingy four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross.
He did notice one peculiarity about it worth remembering. Lon-
don was still JLondon. A certain^ sjtyle dignified ijts grime jjieayy,
'cMmsjj ^arrpgant^^purse-proud, , buXlXQt cheap; insular but large;
barely tolerant of an outside world, and absolutely self-confident.
The boys in the streets made such free comments on the American
clothes and figures, that the travellers hurried to put on tall hats
and long overcoats to escape criticism. No stranger had rights
even in the Strand. The eighteenth century held its own. His-
tory^ muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr. Johnson^ ia_Adams's
ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in yellow chariots with
coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths ; footmen with canes, on the
footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the great
houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments;
every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent j>tructures in the
world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In
November, 1858, London was still vast, but it was the London of
the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated.
Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess
how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him
as a man, but he could still less conceive himself returning to it
fifty years afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city
grew smaller as it doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its
wealth; less imperial as its empire widened; less dignified as it
tried to be civil. Hejiked it best when he hated it. Jdjyication_
began at the end, or perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far
it had reml^dTrT^ century," andTtHe next step took
it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp. As the Baron
Osy steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a travelling
74 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
band on deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working
along the fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade
and Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the
Duke of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral
towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending
abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The
taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was
mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern ; it was one of the strong-
est and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's palate;
but he might as well have drunk out his excitement in old Malm-
sey, for all the education he got from it. Even in art, one can hardly
begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent from the Cross.
He merely got drunk on his emotions, and had then to get sober
as he best could. He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp
half a century afterwards. One lesson he did learn without sus-
pecting that he must immediately lose it. He felt his middle ages
and the sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and the
towns were dirty enough unimproved, unrestored, untouristcd
to retain the sense of reality. As a taste or a smell, it was edu-
cation, especially because it lasted barely ten years longer; but it
was education only sensual. He never dreamed of trying to edu-
cate himself to theDescent from the Cross. He was only too happy
to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the Cross; he learned only
to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up again, and going about
his stupid business.
This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished
rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents. Dropped
into Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man
in search of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstand-
ings. He could never recall what he expected to find, but whatever
he expected, it had no relation with what it turned out to be. A
student at twenty takes easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he
would have accepted the thirteenth century pure and simple since
his guides assured him that this was his right path; but a week's
BERLIN 75
experience left him dazed and dull. Faith held out, but the paths
grew dim. Berlin astonished him, but he had no lack of friends
to show him all the amusement it had to offer. Within a day or
two he was running about with the rest to beer-cellars and music-
halls and dance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer,
and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he knew no better.
This was easy. One can always descend the social ladder. The
trouble came when he asked for the education he was promised.
His friends took him to be registered as a student of the university;
they selected his professors and courses; they showed him where
to buy the Institutes of Gaius and several German works on the
Civil Law in numerous volumes; and they led him to his first
lecture.
His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very
quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and ad-
visers; but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that
he had made another failure in education, and this time a fatal
one. That the language would require at least three months' hard
work before he could touch the Law was an annoying discovery;
but the shock that upset him was the discovery of the university
itself. He had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it
was instinct with life compared with all that he could see of the
University of Berlin. The German students were strange animals,
but their professors were beyond pay. The mental attitude of the
university was not of an American world. What sort of instruction
prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no occasion
to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system in
its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The
professor mumbled his comments ; the students made, or seemed to
make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in
a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they
must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they
wanted a degree. To an American the result was worthless. He
could make no use of the Civil Law without some previous notion
76 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
of the Common Law; but the student who knew enough of the
Common Law to understand what he wanted, had only to read
the Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America, and be
his own professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the
manner could profit an American education.
This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They
went to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never
pretended to take their professor seriously. They were much more
serious in reading Heine. They knew no more than Heine what
good they were getting, beyond the Berlin accent which was
bad; and the beer which was not to compare with Munich; and
the dancing which was better at Vienna. They enjoyed the beer
and music, but they refused to be responsible for the education.
Anyway, as they defended themselves, they were learning the
language.
So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at
languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which
depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin winter
and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom
never attained elsewhere. One day on the Linden he caught sight
of Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him. Sumner was then
recovering from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club,
and he was pleased to find a young worshipper in the remote Prus-
sian wilderness. They dined together and went to hear " William
Tell" at the Opera. Sumner tried to encourage his friend about
his difficulties of language: "I came to Berlin," or Rome, or what-
ever place it was, as he said with his grand air of mastery, "I
came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the language; and three
months later when I went away, I talked it to my cabman."
Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in so short a time such
social advantages, and one day complained of his trials to Mr.
Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in Berlin
for the sake of its music. Mr. Apthorp told of his own similar
struggle, and how he had entered a public school and sat for
BERLIN 77
months with ten-year-old-boys, reciting their lessons and catching
their phrases. The idea suited Adams's desperate frame of mind.
At least it ridded him of the university and the Civil Law and
American associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took the
trouble to negotiate with the head-master of the Friedrichs-
Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for permission to Henry
Adams to attend the school as a member of the Ober-tertia, a class
of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams went for
three months as though he had not always avoided high schools
with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish,
but he was given a bit of education which served him some pur-
pose in life.
It was not merely the language, though three months passed
in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cab-
man, and this was all that foreign students could expect to do,
for they never by any chance would come in contact with Ger-
man society, if German society existed, about which they knew
nothing. Adams never learned to talk German well, but the
same might be said of his English, if he could believe Englishmen.
He learned not to annoy himself on this account. His difficulties
with the language gradually ceased. He thought himself quite
Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that
he read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew
little about it; but whatever success he had in his own experi-
ment interested him less than his contact with German education.
He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
instantly rejected the German university; and as his last experi-
ence of education he tried the German high school. The experi-
ment was hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted,
provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects
disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy
could have imagined. Overridden by military methods and bu-
reaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands
from internal bonds. Apart from discipline, activity scarcely
78 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his insane brother
King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time looking at
the passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the Lin-
den. German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal,
and German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bis-
marck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the
inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was
a scandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose ener-
gies were turned to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams
walked into a great public school to get educated, at precisely
the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the edu-
cation they were forced to follow. As an episode in the search for
education, this adventure smacked of Heine.
The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the
schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer
a practical value, and had very little even at the time; one could
at least say in defence of the German school that it was neither
very brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent
in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse
than in other schools; it was their system that struck the system-
less American with horror. The arbitrary training given to the
memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured
was d form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed,
without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the
memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made
of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German
government did not encourage reasoning. .
All State education is a sort of .dynamo machind for polarizing
the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the
direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The
German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children
was pathetic. The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium
was an old building in the heart of Berlin which served the edu-
cational needs of the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neigh-
BERLIN 79
borhood; the children were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such,
and of a class suspected of sympathy and concern in the trou-
bles of 1848. None was noble or connected with good society.
Personally they were rather sympathetic than not, but as the
objects of education they were proofs of nearly all the evils that
a bad system could give. Apparently Adams, in his rigidly illog-
ical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously logical
education. The boys' physique showed it first, but their physique
could not be wholly charged to the school. German food was bad
at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never
be good; but it was not the food alone that made their faces white
and their flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air; they had
never heard of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of
oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the
school every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the
air was foul beyond all decency; but when the American opened
a window in the five minutes between hours, he violated the rules
and was invariably rebuked. As long as cold weather lasted, the
windows were shut. If the boys had a holiday, they were apt to
be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or elsewhere, always
ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausages, and beer. With
this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have
quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which
they could learn only because their minds were morbid. The
German university had seemed a failure, but the German high
school was something very near an indictable nuisance.
Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except
the ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets, never
to gibber again before any one who could repeat the story. The
derisive Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and
everything else in Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years
old, life is bound to be full, if only of Berlin beer, although Ger-
man student life was on the whole the thinnest of beer, as an
8o THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
American looked on it, but though nothing except small frag-
ments remained of the education that had been so promising
or promised this is only what most often happens in life, when
by-products turn out to be_more valuable than, ^staples. The
German university and German law were failures; German society,
in an American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed
itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand,
was excellent, and German opera, with the ballet, was almost
worth a journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result
of the total failure of German education was that the student's
only clear gain his single step to a higher life came from time
wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged; education reversed;
it came from the despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it
was accidental, unintended, unforeseen.
When his companions insisted on passing two or three after-
noons in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German
tobacco, and looking at fat German women knitting, while an
orchestra played dull music, Adams went with them for the sake
of the company, but with no pretence of enjoyment; and when
Mr. Apthorp gently protested that he exaggerated his indiffer-
ence, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams replied simply
that he loathed B.eethoven; and felt a slight surprise when Mr.
Apthorp and the others laughed as though they thought it humor.
He saw no humor in it. He supposed that, except musicians,
every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathe-
maticians thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-
table, mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice
that his mind followed the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not
have been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language.
Among the marvels of education, this was the most marvellous.
A prison-wall that barred his senses on one great side of life, sud-
denly fell, of its own accord, without so much as his knowing
when it happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor
beer, surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a
BERLIN 8 1
new sense burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old
senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that
he could not credit it, and watched it as something apart, acci-
dental, and not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that
Beethoven had partly become intelligible to him, but he was the
more inclined to think that Bj^oyen)i^
to be so^easjlj followed. This could not be called
^
education, for he had never so much as listened to the music. He
had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical repetition
of certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind. Beethoven
might have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not the
Wagner later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before
he reached the "Gotterdammerung."
One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense the
mechanical reaction of a^ sleeping consciousness but no other
sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever,
and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His metaphysical
sense did not spring into life, so that his mind could leap the bars
of German expression into sympathy with the idealities of Kant
and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith in German thought
and literature was exalted, he failed to approach German thought,
and he shed never a tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and
Schiller. When his father rashly ventured from time to time to
write him a word of common sense, the young man would listen
to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was the best of educa-
tions in the best of Germanics; yet, when, at last, April came, and
some genius suggested a tramp in Thiiringen, his heart sang like
a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had suffered, and he made
up his mind that, wherever else he might, in the infinities of space
and time, seek for education, it should not be again in Berlin.
CHAPTER VI
ROME (1859-1860)
THE tramp in Thiiringen lasted four-and-twenty hours.
By the end of the first walk, his three companions
John Bancroft, James J. Higginson, and B. W. Crownin-
shield, all Boston and Harvard College like himself were satis-
fied with what they had seen, and when they sat down to rest on
the spot where Goethe had written
"Wartenur! balde
Ruhest du auch! "
the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of the advice
affected them so strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to
Weimar the same night. They were all quite happy and light-
hearted in the first fresh breath of leafless spring, and the beer was
better than at Berlin, but they were all equally in doubt why they
had come to Germany, and not one of them could say why they
stayed. Adams stayed because he did not want to go home, and
he had fears that his father's patience might be exhausted if he
asked to waste time elsewhere.
They could not think that their education required a return to
Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied
them that Dresden was a better spot for general education than
Berlin, and equally good for reading Civil Law. They were possi-
bly right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and no educa-
tion to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios
were famous; the theatre and opera were sometimes excellent, and
the Elbe was prettier than the Spree. They could always fall back
on the language. So he took a room in the household of the usual
small government clerk with the usual plain daughters, and con-
tinued the study of the language. Possibly one might learn some-
thing more by accident, as one had learned something of Beet-
ROME 83
1 ,
hoven. For the next eighteen months the young man pursued
accidental education, since he could pursue no other; and by great
good fortune, Europe and America were too busy with their own
affairs to give much attention to his. Accidental education had
every chance in its favor, especially because nothing came amiss.
Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that
he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in
his intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he still
persuaded himself that his German education was a success. He
loved, or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved
was the eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of,
and were destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to
come, he knew nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence.
What he liked was the simple character; the good-natured senti-
ment; the musical and metaphysical abstraction; the blundering
incapacity of the German for practical affairs. At that time every-
one looked on Germany as incapable of competing with France,
England or America in any sort of organized energy. Germany
had no confidence in herself, and no reason to feel it. She had no
unity, and no reason to want it. She never had unity. Her reli-
gious and social history, her economical interests, her military
geography, her political convenience, had always tended to eccen-
tric rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and railways
were created, she was mediaeval by nature and geography, and
this was what Adams, under the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell,
liked.
He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering be-
tween worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a haEItof crush-
ing men who stayed too long at the points of contact. Suddenly
the Emperor Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised a con-
fused point of morals in the mind of Europe. France was the
nightmare of Germany, and even at Dresden one looked on the
return of Napoleon to Leipsic as the most likely thing in the world.
One morning the government clerk, in whose family Adams was
84 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
staying, rushed into his room to consult a map in order that he
might measure the distance from Milan to Dresden. The third
Napoleon had reached Lombardy, and only fifty or sixty years had
passed since the first Napoleon had begun his military successes
from an Italian base.
An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century
tastes capped by fragments of a German education and the most
excellent intentions, had to make up his mind about the moral
value of these conflicting forces. France was the wicked spirit of
moral politics, and whatever helped France must be so far evil.
At that time Austria was another evil spirit. Italy was the prize
they disputed, and for at least fifteen hundred years had been the
chief object of their greed. The question of sympathy had dis-
turbed a number of persons during that period. The question of
morals had been put in a number of cross-lights. Should one be
Guelph or Ghibelline? No doubt, one was wiser than one's neigh-
bors who had found no way of settling this question since the days
of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did better to discard the at-
tempt to be wise, for wisdom had been singularly baffled by the
problem. Better take sides first, and reason about it for the rest
of life.
Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or
wishes. He had not been German long enough for befogging his
mind to that point, but the moment was decisive for much to
come, especially for political morals. His morals were the highest,
and he clung to them to preserve his self-respect; but steam and
electricity had brought about new political and social concentra-
tions, or were making them necessary in the line of his moral
principles freedom, education, economic development and so
forth which required association with allies as doubtful as
Napoleon III, and robberies with violence on a very extensive
scale. As long as he could argue that his opponents were wicked,
he could join in robbing and killing them without a qualm; but
it might happen that the good were robbed. Education insisted
ROME 85
on finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin
life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless
he could satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were
a virtue and duty. Education founded on mere self-interest was
merely Guelph and Ghibelline over again * Machiavelli translated
into American.
luckily for him he had a sister much brighter than he ever was
though he thought himself a rather superior person who
after marrying Charles Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy,
and, like all good Americans and English, was hotly Italian. In
July, 1859, she was at Thun in Switzerland, and there Henry
Adams joined them. Women have, commonly, a very positive
moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject,
is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
Mrs. Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored Italy,
but she cordially disliked Germany in all its varieties. She saw
no gain in helping her brother to be Germanized, and she wanted
him much to be civilized. She was the first young woman he was
ever intimate with quick, sensitive, v^ilful, or full of will, ener-
getic, sympathetic and intelligent enough to supply a score of men
with ideas and he was delighted to give her the reins to let
her drive him where she would. It was his first experiment in
giving the reins to a woman, and he was so much pleased with the
results that he never wanted to take them back. In after life he
made a general law of experience no wpmaaJiaiever driven him
wrong; no man had ever driven him right.
Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war
as soon as the armistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed,
nothing was easier. The party crossed the St. Gothard and
reached Milan, picturesque with every sort of uniform and every
sign of wan To young Adams this first plunge into Italy passed
Beethoven as a piece of accidental education. Like music, it
differed from other education in being, not a means of pursuing
life, but one of the ends attained. Further, on these lines, one
86 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
could not go. It had but one defect that of attainment. Life
had no richer impression to give; it offers barely half-a-dozen such,
and the intervals seem long. Exactly what they teach would
puzzle a Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an economic value,
since most people would decline to part with even their faded
memories except at a valuation ridiculously extravagant. They
were also what men pay most for; but one's ideas become hope-
lessly mixed in trying to reduce such forms of education to a
standard of exchangeable value, and, as in political economy,
one had best disregard altogether what cannot be stated in equiv-
alents. The proper equivalent of pleasure is pain, which is also
a form of education.
Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the
enemy's country, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by
way of the Stelvio Pass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove
up it, showed war. Garibaldi's Cacciatori were the only visible
inhabitants. No one could say whether the pass was open, but
in any case no carriage had yet crossed. At the inns the handsome
young officers in command of the detachments were delighted to
accept invitations to dinner and to talk all the evening of their
battles to the charming patriot who sparkled with interest and
flattery, but not one of them knew whether their enemies, the
abhorred Austrian Jagers, would let the travellers through their
lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the character failing in any party
that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after climbing what
was said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe, the carriage
turned the last shoulder, where the glacier of the Ortler Spitze
tumbled its huge mass down upon the road, even Mrs. Kuhn
gasped when she was driven directly up to the barricade and
stopped by the double line of sentries stretching on either side
up the mountains, till the flash of the gun barrels was lost in the
flash of the snow. For accidental education the picture had its
value. The earliest of these pictures count for most, as first
impressions must, and Adams never afterwards cared much for
ROME 87
landscape education, except perhaps in the tropics for the sake of
the contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, and set
aside.
The handsome blond officers of the Jagers were not to be beaten
in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the
Cacciatori. The eternal^ woman as usual, when she is young,
pretty, and engaging, had her way, and the barricade offered no
resistance. In fifteen minutes the carriage was rolling down to
Mais, swarming with German soldiers and German fleas, worse than
the Italian; and German language, thought, and atmosphere,
of which young Adams, thanks to his glimpse of Italy, never again
felt quite the old confident charm.
Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his
cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his companions suggested.
Faithful to his self-contracted scheme of passing two winters in
study of the Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter
to the Frau Hofrathin von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and
other Americans had pursued studies more or less serious. In
those days, "The Initials" was a new book. The charm which its
clever author had laboriously woven over Munich gave also a
certain reflected light to Dresden. Young Adams had nothing to
do but take fencing-lessons, visit the galleries and go to the
theatre; but his social failure in the line of "The Initials," was
humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofrathin herself
was sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total discomfiture
and helplessness of the young American in the face of her society.
Possibly an education may be the wider and the richer for a large
experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and Clarence King,
at about the same time, were enriching their education by a pic-
turesque intimacy with the manners of the Apaches and Digger
Indians. All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams
admitted himself unable to guess what use his second winter in
Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even the
doctrine of accidental education broke down. There were no
88 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, he closed
and locked the German door with a long breath of relief, and took
the road to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as it pleased
him, for eighteen months, and in spite of the infinite variety of
new impressions which had packed themselves into his mind, he
knew no more, for his practical purposes, than the day he gradu-
ated. He had made no step towards a profession. He was as
ignorant as a schoolboy of society. He was unfit for any career
in Europe, and unfitted for any career in America, and he had not
natural intelligence enough to see what a mess he had thus far
made of his education.
By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one
might perhaps find some use for accidental and devious knowl-
edge, but this had been no part of Henry Adams's plan when he
chose the path most admired by the best judges, and followed it
till he found it led nowhere. Nothing had been further from his
mind when he started in November, 1858, than to become a tourist,
but a mere tourist, and nothing else, he had become in April, 1860,
when he joined his sister in Florence. His father had been in the
right. The young man felt a little sore about it. Supposing his
father asked him, on his return, what equivalent he had brought
back for the time and money put into his experiment! The only
possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a tourist!"
The answer was not what he had meant it to be, and he was
not likely to better it by asking his father, in turn, what equiva-
lent his brothers or cousins or friends at home had got out of the
same time and money spent in Boston. All they had put into the
law was certainly thrown away, but were they happier in science?
In theory one might say, with some show of proof, that a pure,
scientific education was alone correct; yet many of his friends who
took it, found reason to complain that it was anything but a pure,
scientific world in which they lived.
Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own,
without seeking more in his son's errors. His Quincy district had
ROME 89
sent him to Congress, and in the spring of 1860 he was in the full
confusion of nominating candidates for the Presidential election
in November. He supported Mr. Seward. The Republican Party
was an unknown force, and the Democratic Party was torn to
pieces. No one could see far into the future. Fathers could
blunder as well as sons, and, in 1860, every one was conscious
of being dragged along paths much less secure than those of the
European tourist. For the time, the young man was safe from
interference, and went on his way with a light heart to take what-
ever chance fragments of education God or the devil was pleased
to give him, for he knew no longer the good from the bad.
He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps
the most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his
pen, for he wrote long letters, during the next three months, to
his brother Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the
Boston Courier; and the exercise was good for him. He had little
to say, and said it not very well, but that mattered less. Thejhabjt
of expression leads to the search for something to express. Some-
thing remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one
strikes out every commonplace in the expression. Young men
as a rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else, and in after life,
when Adams began to learn what some men could see, he shrank
into corners of shame at the thought that he should have be-
trayed his own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he
invited his neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the
nearest approach he had yet made to an intelligent act.
For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion nat-
urally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough,
while bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept
Rome as legitimate education, though abused; but to young men
seeking education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that
everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome
was altogether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome be-
fore 1870 was seductive beyond resistance. The month of May,
90 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
1860, was divine. No doubt other young men, and occasionally
young women, have passed the month of May in Rome since
then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly
it does in them but in 1860 the lights and shadows were
still mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows
breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No
sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history,
thought, and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches
unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sor-
cery. Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-
century youth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One's
emotions in Rome were one's private affair, like one's glass of
absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful,
else they could not have been so intense; and they were surely
immoral, for no t>rre, priest or politician, could honestly read in
the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were
evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all the
doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the
last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by
common consent, the only spot that the young of either sex
and every race passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.
Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
rnan conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is
apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion
after conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked
idly enough at the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot
the look, and it never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian,
fresh from Germany, Rome seemed a pure emotion, quite free
from economic or actual values, and he could not in reason or
common sense foresee that it was mechanically piling up conun-
drum after conundrum in his educational path, which seemed
unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed in-
soluble but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle
ROME 91
to be dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read
in a railway train and thrown out of the window after other bad
French novels, the morals of which could never approach the
immorality of Roman history. Rome was actual; it was England;
it was going to be America. Rome could not be fitted into an
orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution.
No law of progress applied to it. Not even time-sequences
the last refuge of helpless historians had value for it. The
Forum no more led to the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum.
Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed
up in any relation of time, along with a thousand more, and never
lead to a sequence. The great word Evolution had not yet, in
1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had
preached the same doctrine for a thousand years without finding
in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile.
The problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was
more vital in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when
the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to
the mind of Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing
in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they
were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the
Capitol." Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this pas-
sage from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which led Adams more
than once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of Santa
Maria di Ara Cceli, curiously wondering that .not an inch^had been
gained by. Gibbon or all the historians since towards ex-
plaining the Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm
remained intact. Two great experiments
had left there the chief monuments of their failure, and nothing
proved that the city might not still survive to express the failure
of a third.
92 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought
of posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist,
even to the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for
him that he should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men
cannot sit with dignity, "in the close of evening, among the ruins
of the Capitol/' unless they have something quite original to say
about it. Tacitus could do it; so could Michael Angelo; and so,
at a pinch, could Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic; but, in
sum, none of them could say very much more than the tourist,
who went on repeating to himself the eternal question: Why!
Why!! Why!!! as his neighbor, the blind beggar, might do, sit-
ting next him, on the church steps. No one ever had answered the
question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet every one who had
either head or heart, felt that sooner or later he must make up his
mind what answer to accept. Substitute the word America for
the word Rome, and the question became personal.
Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never
knew it, and never sought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The great-
est men of the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome
for a background. Perhaps Garibaldi possibly even Cavour
could have sat "in the close of the evening, among the ruins of the
Capitol," but one hardly saw Napoleon III there, or Palmerston
or Tennyson or Longfellow. One morning, Adams happened to
be chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged
Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he
had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at com-
ing unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been
put to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had
quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of
a story till time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn
what new form of grim horror had for the moment wiped out the
memory of two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the con-
solation, derived from history and statistics, that most citizens
of Rome seemed to be the better for guillotining. Only by slow
ROME 93
degrees, he grappled the conviction that the victim of the shock
was Robert Browning; and, on the background of the Circus
Maximus, the Christian martyrs flaming as torches, and the morn-
ing's murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place,
as a middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while after-
wards, in the light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made
part of his background except by effacement. Browning might
have sat with Gibbon, among the ruins, and few Romans would
have smiled.
Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo; and
Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of
Cicero and Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no teach-
ing, the lessons of a rather cheap imagination and cheaper politics.
Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions,
energies; without her, the Western world was pointless and frag-
mentary; she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon might
have gone on for the whole century, sitting among the ruins of the
Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling him
what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.
So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet of-
fered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the
Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself
that he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better
had he said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive.
In spite of swarming impressions he knew no more when he left
Rome than he did when he entered it. As a marketable object, his
value was less. His next step went far to convince him that acci-
dental education, whatever its economical return might be, was
prodigiously successful as an object in itself. Everything con-
spired to ruin his sound scheme of life, and to make him a vagrant
as well as pauper. He went on to Naples, and there, in the hot
June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand were about
94 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister, Chandler
of Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit, but for
his name, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to send him to the
seat of war as bearer of despatches to Captain Palmer of the
American sloop of war Iroquois. Young Adams seized the chance,
and went to Palermo in a government transport filled with fleas,
commanded by a charming Prince Caracciolo.
He told all about it to the Boston Courier, where the narrative
probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did
not speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether
it had any bearing whatever, and what was its value as a post-
graduate course. Quite apart from its value as life attained, real-
ized, capitalized, it had also a certain value as a lesson in some-
thing, though Adams could never classify the branch of study.
Loosely, the tourist called it knowledge of men, but it was just
the reverse; it was knowledge of one's ignorance of men.; Captain
Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a friend of the young man's uncle,
Sydney Brooks, took him with the officers of the ship to make an
evening call on Garibaldi, whom they found in the Senate House
towards sunset, at supper with his picturesque and piratic staff,
in the full noise and color of the Palermo revolution. As a spec-
tacle, it belonged to Rossini and the Italian opera, or to Alexandre
Dumas at the least, but the spectacle was not its educational side.
Garibaldi left the table, and, sitting down at the window, had a
few words of talk with Captain Palmer and young Adams. At
that moment, in the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was certainly the
most serious of the doubtful energies in the world ; the most essen-
tial to gauge rightly. Even then society was dividing between
banker and anarchist. One or the other, Garibaldi must serve.
Himself a typical anarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarm
empires bigger than Naples, his success depended on his mind;
his energy was beyond doubt.
Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and f
ROME 95
for five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment
of his greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw
a quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt; absolutely
impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing. Sympathetic
it was, and one felt that it was simple; one suspected even that it
might be childlike, but could form no guess of its intelligence. In
his own eyes Garibaldi might be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the
hands of Cavour he might become a Condottiere; in the eyes of his-
tory he might, like the rest of the world, be only the vigorous player
The student was none the wiser.
This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible
to itself than to a young American who had no experience in double
natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth, Gari-
baldi saw and said that he had not understood his own acts ; that
he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposes of the
class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the
revolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was unbounded.
What should a young Bostonian have made of a character like
this, internally alive with childlike fancies, and externally quiet,
simple, almost innocent; uttering with apparent conviction the
usual commonplaces of popular politics that all politicians use as
the small change of their intercourse with the public; but never
betraying a thought?
Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it.
The lesson of Garibaldi, as educatjon^sejsm
treme complexity of extreme simplicity; ^but . pne could have
learnecTERis from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recol-
Ie<rri6n 5f~^ seafaring captain of
Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July
heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among the bar-
ricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to remember
that simplicity is complex.
96 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to stum-
ble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two
or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris,
and had wanted no French influence in his education. He dis-
approved of France in the lump. A certain knowledge of the lan-
guage one must have; enough to order dinner and buy a theatre
ticket; but more he did not seek. He disliked the Empire and the
Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he disliked most the
French mind. To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long
list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once
for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France was
not serious, and he was not serious in going there.
He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he
felt quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he disapproved.
Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of
fact, several thousand Americans passed much of their time there
on this understanding. They sought to take share in every func-
tion that was open to approach, as they sought tickets to the
opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest.
All thought of serious education had long vanished. He tried to
acquire a few French idioms, without even aspiring to master a
subjunctive, but he succeeded better in acquiring a modest taste
for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two sauces ; for the Trois
Freres Proven^aux and Voisin's and Philippe's and the Cafe
Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Varietes and the
Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Cheri and Gil
Perez, and other lights of the stage. His friends were good to him.
Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became familiar. In a month or
six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of it; but he studied noth-
ing, entered no society, and made no acquaintance. Accidental
education went far in Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowl-
edge that might become useful; perhaps, after all, the three months
ROME 97
passed there might serve better purpose than the twenty-one
months passed elsewhere; but he did not intend it did not
think it and looked at it as a momentary and frivolous vaca-
tion before going home to fit himself for life. Therewith, after
staying as long as he could and spending all the money he dared,
he started with mixed emotions but no education, for home.
CHAPTER VII
TREASON (1860-1861)
9 forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked
back over his adventures in search of knowledge, he
asked himself whether fortune or fate had ever dealt
its cards quite so wildly to any of his known antecessors as when
it led him to ; I^a jie jst^
Lincoln on the same day.
He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which
played with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The
simile is none too strong. Not one man in America wanted the
Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted
secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their occupa-
tions in peace. Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what
happened. Possibly a few Southern loyalists in despair might
dream it as an impossible chance; but none planned it.
As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite
heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted away.
The prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father asked
a malicious question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he hinted
at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as
private secretary during the winter in Washington, as though any
young man who could afford to throw away two winters on the
Civil Law could afford to read Blackstone for another winter
without a master. The young man was beyond satire, and asked
only a pretext for throwing all education to the east wind. No-
vember at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been from
earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does
the uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail
TREASON V 99
wreck of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November
seemed temperate before the chill of a Boston January.
This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy
stood apart from other memories as lurid beyond description.
Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the
Republicans organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in
a form military in all things except weapons. Henry reached home
in time to see the last of these processions, stretching in ranks of
torches along the hillside, file down through the November night
to the Old House, where Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress,
received them, and, let them pretend what they liked, their air
was not that of innocence.
Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man
packed his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be un-
packed, and started for Washington with his family. Ten years
had passed since his last visit, but very little had changed. As in
1800 and 1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony was camped in
the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work-
rooms, and sloughs for roads. The Government had an air of so-
cial instability and incompleteness that went '.faOOL 5iippQ?t tl}
jight of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, seces-
sion was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from.
The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December,
1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far
as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in Philadelphia
in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in Washington.
Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental Con-
gress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in 1860-61,
no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all the crowd
swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was surely
among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly that the
knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly greater
than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master a lesson
so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after Oxenstiern:
ioo THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
"Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern talked of a
world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself seeking
education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and igno-
rant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in
mind fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallu-
cination haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent mor-
bid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously
ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were men-
tally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely
known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains of
power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like
oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson
of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inade-
quate hands.
- This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was para-
dox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles
Sumner's chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance,
and he stood a living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams had
come for a new education, and the school was seriously, honestly,
taken by most of the world, including Europe, as proper for the
purpose, although the Sioux Indians would have taught less mis-
chief. From such contradictions among intelligent people, what
was a young man to learn ?
He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to
teach or to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided,
he was too glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the education
of a reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson from the
Confederate school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one
sweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac was
shut off; it was overshadowed by the cotton planters, from whom
one could learn nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker, and
treason.
TREASON 101
Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept
and example; first of all, on his New England surroundings. Re-
publican houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs.
Adams aimed to create a social centre for New Englanders. They
took a house on I Street, looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, weli
out towards Georgetown the Markoe house and there the
private secretary began to learn his social duties, for the political
were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies of the Capitol.
He had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly, but he
knew of no one who knew more.
The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England
type was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own
features. Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone
and was the boy's oldest friend, all the New Englanders were
sane and steady men, well-balanced, educated, and free from mean-
ness or intrigue men whom one liked to act with, and who,
whether graduates or not, bore the stamp of Harvard College.
Anson Burlingame was one exception, and perhaps Israel Wash-
burn another; but as a rule the New Englander's strength was his
poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered no more
target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he repelled;
even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. The
character, with its force or feebleness, was familiar; one knew it
to the core; one was it had been run in the same mould.
There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to
Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few
other men born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to
Henry J. Raymond, who came to view the field for the Nezv York
Times, and who was a man of the world. The average Congress-
man was civil enough, but had nothing to ask except offices, and
nothing to offer but the views of his district. The average Senator
was more reserved, but had not much more to say, being always^
excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his own
importance.
IO2 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence
of only two men Sumner and Seward.
Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and,
after his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite recov-
ered its tone; but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary existence as
Senator had most to do with his development. No man, however
strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator,
and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life
have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as
though they mesmerized the subject. Yet even among Senators
there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank South Caro-
linian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or Sumner
himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became Shake-
spearian and bou/e as Godkin used to call it like Malvolio.
Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at least the
merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly thought,
as Webster had thought before him, that his great services and sac-
rifices, his superiority in education, his oratorical power, his polit-
ical experience, his representative character at the head of the
whole New England contingent, and, above all, his knowledge of
the world, made him the most important member of the Senate;
and no Senator had ever saturated himself more thoroughly with
the spirit and temper of the body.
Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members
a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one
'Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and
still more seldom likes to be told of it. Even the greatest Senators
seemed to inspire little personal affection in each other, and be-
trayed none at all. Sumner had a number of rivals who held his
judgment in no high esteem, and one of these was Senator Seward.
The two men would have disliked each other by instinct had they
lived in different planets. Each was created only for exasperat-
TREASON 103
ing the other; the virtues of one were the faults of his rival, until
no good quality seemed to remain of either. That the public serv-
ice must suffer was certain, but what were the sufferings of the
public service compared with the risks run by a young mosquito
a private secretary trying to buzz admiration in the ears of
each, and unaware that each would impatiently slap at him for
belonging to the other? Innocent and unsuspicious beyond what
was permitted even in a nursery, the private secretary courted
both.
Private secretaries are servants of' a rather low order, whose
business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a profes-
sional kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching
Washington, was that the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had
selected Mr. Seward for his Secretary of State, and that Seward
was to be the medium for communicating his wishes to his fol-
lowers. Every young man naturally accepted the wishes of Mr.
Lincoln as orders, the more because he could see that the new
President was likely to need all the help that several million
young men would be able to give, if they counted on having any
President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for
the first meeting with the new Secretary of State.
Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He pro-
fessed to be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He
had been Senator since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had
separated him from the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry light
of the first Free Soil faith, the ways of New York politics and of
Thurlow Weed had not won favor; but the fierce heat which
welded the Republican Party in 1856 melted many such barriers,
and when Mr. Adams came to Congress in December, 1859, Gov-
ernor Seward instantly renewed his attitude of family friend, be-
came a daily intimate in the household, and lost no chance of
forcing his fresh ally to the front.
A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the
IO4 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
family, and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to
watch him as carefully as one generally watches men who dispose
of one's future. A slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise
macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and
clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual
cigar, offered a new type of western New York to fathom;
a type in one way simple because it was only double political
and personal; but complex because the political had become na-
ture, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the
features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint,
or seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world he threw
it off, like a politician, for effect. In both cases he chose to appear
as a free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but
how much was nature and how much was mask, he was himself
too simple a nature to know. Underneath the surface he was
conventional after the conventions of western New York and
Albany. Politicians thought it unconventional-fry. Bostonians
thought it provincial. Henry Adams thought it charming. From
the first sight, he loved the Governor, who, though sixty years old,
had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed that Mr. Seward
was never petty or personal; his talk was large; he generalized;
he never seemed to . pose for statesmanship; he did not require
an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual almost sin-
gular and quite eccentric he had some means, unknown to
other Senators, of producing the effect of unselfishness.
Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts; es-
sentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be
rigid, but the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple
enough when it chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had
been attacked in succession as no better than political mercenaries.
Mr. Hildreth, in his standard history, went so far as to echo with
approval the charge that treachery was hereditary in the family.
Any Adams had at least to be thick-skinned, hardened to every
contradictory epithet that virtue could supply, and, on the whole,
TREASON 105
armed to return such attentions; but all must have admitted that
they had invariably subordinated local to national interests, and
would continue to do so, whenever forced to choose. C. F. Adams
was sure to do what his father had done, as his father had followed
the steps of John Adams, and no doubt thereby earned his epi-
thets.
The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on
the edge of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove
his masters on their various paths he made no pretence of guess-
ing; even at that age he preferred to admit his dislike for guess-
ing motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before
which he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always
matter of simple-minded surprise. Critics who know ultimate
truth will pronounce judgment on history; all that Henry Adams
ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance., and he never
sawquite so much^of it as in the winter of 1 860-61. Every one
Icnows the story; every one draws what conclusion suits his tem-
per, and the conclusion matters now less than though it concerned
the merits of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861
the conclusion made the sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed
and concentrated education.
Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers
in Washington decided that, before they could administer the
Government, they must make sure of a government to admin-
ister, and that this chance depended on the action of Virginia.
The whole ascendancy of the winter wavered between the effort
of the cotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the
new President to keep Virginia in. Governor Seward represent-
ing the Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr. Adams
took the lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary knew,
the party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty,
of dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open
io6 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
eyes. As Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after
Mr. Adams and he had made their speeches: "If there's no seces-
sion now, you and I are ruined."
They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of the
historians who tell their story; their private secretaries had nothing
to do with it except to follow their orders. On that side a sec-
retary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The sudden
arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and the lan-
guage of his inaugural address, were the final term of the win-
ter's tactics, and closejithfiLJlriyate secretary's interest in the mat-
ter forever. Perhaps he felt, even then, a good deal more interest
in the appearance of another private secretary, of his own age,
a young man named John Hay, who lighted on La Fayette Square
at the same moment. Eriends are born, not made, and Henry
never mistook a friend except "when In power. From the first
sfiiEt meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay
as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4
when Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon
new shoulders, and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He
had tried to make himself useful, and had exerted energy that
seemed to him portentous, acting in secret as newspaper corre-
spondent, cultivating a large acquaintance and even haunting ball-
rooms where the simple, old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleas-
ant even in the atmosphere of conspiracy and treason. The sum
was next to nothing for education, because no one could teach;
all were as ignorant as himself; none knew what should be done,
or how to do it; all were trying to learn and were more bent on
asking than on answering questions. The mass of ignorance in
Washington was lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society,
rpmjtop to bottom, broke down.
From tKis law "there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only mili-
tary figure that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either
TREASON
looked it, or was it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had
young Adams been told that his life was to hang on the correct-
ness of his estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He
saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an
Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of char-
acter. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face;
a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white
kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor
any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful
sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tor-
mented a private secretary; above all a Jftck of apparent force.
Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have
thought, as Adams did, that no.jnan living needed so much educa-
tion as the new President but that all the education he could get
would not be enough.
"~As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no
one in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties
in March were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who
thought they knew something were more in error than those who
knew nothing. Education was matter of life and death, but all
the education in the world would have helped nothing. Only one
man in Adams's reach seemed to him supremely fitted by knowl-
edge and experience to be an adviser and friend. This was Senator
Sumner; and there, in fact, the young man's education began;
there it ended.
Going over the experience again, long after all the great actors
were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In the
effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have
liked much to know whether he could have helped it. He had
necessarily followed Seward and his father; he took for granted
that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; he sup-
posed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled all
personal doubts. He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator
Sumner privately denounced the course, regarded Mr. Adams
io8 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
as betraying the principles of his life, and broke off relations
with his family.
Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a
long life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the pro-
foundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden
-strains that permanently warp the mind? He^carecTTif tie or noth-
ing about the point in discussion; he was even willing to admit
that Surnner might be right, though in all great emergencies he
commonly found that every one was more or less wrong; he liked
lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he felt
a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened, a
chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life lasted, he found
himself invariably taking for granted, as a political instinct, with-
out waiting further experiment as he took for granted that
arsenic poisoned the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.
On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or after-
wards, but his education for good or bad made an enor-
mous stride. One has to deal with all sorts of unexpected morals
in life, and, at this moment, he was looking at hundreds of South-
ern gentlemen who believed themselves singularly honest, but
who seemed to hinr engaged in the plainest breach of faith and
the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they did not disturb his edu-
cation. History told of little else; and not one rebel defection
not even Robert E. Lee's cost young Adams a personal pang;
but Sumner's struck home.
This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to
him hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March,
1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to
good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wander-
ing between two .worlds, pne dead^ the other powerless to ^>e born,
helps nothing. Washington was a dismal school. Even before the
traitors had flown, the vultures descended on it in swarms that
TREASON 109
v - " -""
darkened the ground, and tore the carrion of political patronage
into fragments and gobbets of fat and lean, on the very steps of
tfee White Mouse. Not a man there knew what his task was to
be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or
Southern, was to : learn his business at the cost of the public. Lin-
coln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the
young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of
such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten
thousand million dollars, more or less/ North and South, before
the country could recover its balance and movement. Henry
was a helpless victim, and, like all the rest, he could only wait for
he knew not what, to send him he knew not where.
With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceas-
ing to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but re-
turn with his father and mother to Boston in the middle of March,
and, with childlike docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office
of Horace Gray in Court Street, to begin again: "My Lords and
Gentlemen"; dozing after a two o'clock dinner, or waking to dis-
cuss politics with the future Justice. There, in ordinary times, he
would have remained for life, his attempt at education in treason
having, like all the rest, disastrously failed.
CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY (1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced
that President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis
Adams as his Minister to England. Once more, silently,
Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head
sententiously announced many centuries before: Time had passed!
The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law prolonged its
shadowy existence for a week. The law ? altogether, as path of
education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving a million young men
planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life with-
out education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had
asked millions they would have got no answers. No one could help.
Looking back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years after-
wards, one could only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr.
Adams once more intimated that he thought himself entitled to
the services of one of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only
one who could be spared from more serious duties. Henry packed
his trunk again without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridic-
ulous as he knew himself about to be in his new role, he was less
ridiculous than his betters. He was at least no public official, like
the thousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded
their jealousies and intrigues on the President. He was not a vul-
ture of carrion patronage. He knew that his father's appoint-
ment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship;
he did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the
reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could
have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the
strongest and most decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams
had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his chief. That
Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard to find a fit
DIPLOMACY 1 1 1
appointment in the list of possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner
v himself ; and no one knew so well as this experienced Senator that
the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of fitness was his consent
to quit a safe seat in Congress for an exceedingly unsafe seat in
London with no better support than Senator Sumner, at the head
of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to give him. In
the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous risk,
but never before had they taken one so desperate.
The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the un-
fitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except
perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary
of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive
appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for
the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as
Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the post, or
of helping the Minister. The Assistant Secretary was inherited
from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially useless. Mr.
Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps he knew no
name to suggest; perhaps he knew too much of Washington; but
he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of strength in his son.
The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his
path by giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote
letters, it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at
that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people.
The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except
in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst
and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams
mtolTie surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten
about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had time to
watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House in
the April evenings and march southward, quietly enough, with
the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few signs
or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the harbor
H2 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before
being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of
the Army of the Potomac to get educated in alury^of .fire. Few
things were for the moment so trivial in importance as the soli-
tary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cu-
nard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for Liverpool.
This time the pitcher of education had gone to the fountain once
too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man had got to
meet a hostile world without defence or arms.
The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May I,
1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have
enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal
with one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he
was alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to
Mr. Adams the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a
palace in London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal let-
ters of introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra
burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate person in the
party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never
dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplo-
macy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams re-
membered how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston
in midwinter, 1778, on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-
year-old son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy
of adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remem-
bered how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with him-
self, a baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar
Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as
John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought it
natural that the Government should send him out as an adven-
turer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even
notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could
DIPLOMACY 113
depend on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Cer-
tainly not on the Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Rela-
tions. Minister Adams had no friend in the Senate; he could hope
for no favors, and he asked none. He thought it right to play the
adventurer as his father and grandfather had done before him,
without a murmur. This was a lofty view, and for him answered
his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the
young man realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal.
He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer,
and judged his father to be less fit than himself.
Amencaj^as posing as the champJQn .of legitimacy and order. '
Her representatives should know how to play their role; they
should wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr.
Adams in 1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private
secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the
Court and Parliament of Great Britain.
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of the
scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they
overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they stood
with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him
quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same
ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius
M. Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education
profited less than the private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a
teacher having no equal though possibly some rivals. No young
man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from such
lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious that, for
the next two years, the persons were few indeed who felt, or
ha3~reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government; few-
est of all among those who were in it. At home, for the most part,
young men went to the war, grumbled and died ; in England they
might grumble or not; no one listened.
Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his chief.
He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never
ii4 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
laboredjijojiard to learn a language^as, .h$ did toholdj^isjongue,
and it affected Kim For life, The habit of reticence of talking
without meaning is never effaced. He had to begin it at once.
He was already an adept when the party landed at Liverpool,
May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a family of early
Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena of lions, under
the glad eyes of -Tiberius; Palmerston.l Though Lord Palmerston
would have laughed his pecuiraTPalmerston laugh at figuring as
Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance in the
Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the ceremony.
Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than
his son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought
is the affair of history and their errors concern historians. The
errors of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and
were a large part of his education. He thought on May 12 that
he was going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest profession.
For a hundred years the chief effort of his family had aimed at
bringing the Government of England into intelligent cooperation
with the objects and interests of America. His father was about
to make a new effort, and this time the chance of success was
promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent obstacle
to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself, he
was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not con-
ceive the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself, as one
of the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome
everywhere in the British Islands.
On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning
of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left
of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn the sooner
the better that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in
May, 1861, no one in England literally no one doubted that
Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all
DIPLOMACY 115
were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated
Palmerston, who, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the sev-
eranjce_asjl djjtnjnution of ^dangerQ^^powerj but prudently held
his tongue/' The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared. Lord
John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the rebel emis-
saries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency before the
arrival of Mr, Adams in order to fix the position of the British
Government in advance. The recognition of independence would
then become an understood policy; a matter of time and occasion.
Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension
a sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow.
Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The
chances were great that the whole family would turn round and
go home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless
waves of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long
leisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation had
his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be
unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for his
trifling though it were was proved by his unreflecting confi-
dence in his father. It never entered his mind that his father
might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent knowl-
edge of statesmen and diplomats extending over several genera-
tions, he could not certainly point out another who could have
stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this long day,
and tedious journey to London, without once thinking of the pos-
sibility that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the
Minister thought, and certainly his thought was not less active
than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His manner
was the same as ever; his mind and temper were as perfectly
balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve twitched.
The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden could
possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private
secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his father
ii6 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into
Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst of a
London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he pre-
ferred to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the waiter's
" 'amhandheggsir" for breakfast, rather than ask a question or
express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously, was too ap-
palling to face. Had he known it better, he would only have
thought it worse.
Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond re-
trieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of circumstances,
a newcomer in London society needs years to establish a position,
and Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his
son had not even a remote chance of beginning. Politically the
prospect looked even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Sena-
tor Sumner it was so; but for the Minister, on the spot, as he came
to realize exactly where he stood, the danger was not so immi-
nent. Mr, Adaips was always one of the luckiest of men, both in
what he achieved and in what he escaped. The blow, which pros-
trated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John Russell
had acted had probably intended to act kindly by him in
forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three
months, and would then have broken him down. The British
Ministers were a little in doubt still a little ashamed of them-
selves and certain to wait the longer for their next step in
proportion to the haste of their first.
This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor.
The father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's
was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles
Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as ene-
mies; the only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred
and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling with
State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street; and the
DIPLOMACY 117
British Government, well used to a liberal unpopularity abroad,
^vra when officially j&d&liked. Jtp be personally civil. All diplo-
matic agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a corner, and are
none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing in especial
to complain of; his position was good while it lasted, and he had
only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such compensa-
tions. Brought over in order to help his father, he could con-
ceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was clear that
his father had got to help him. To him, the Legation was social
ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire soli-
tude in the great society of London was doubly desperate be-
cause his duties as private secretary required him to know every-
body and go with his father and mother everywhere they needed
escort. He had no friend, or even enemy, to tell him to be patient.
Had any one done it, he would surely have broken out with the
reply that gatience was the last resource of fools as well as of
sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do it at once, for
his father would never so much need help again. In fact he never
gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman,
clerk, or a companion for the younger children.
He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too com-
mon in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most
secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but
useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son could
go only as an invited guest, the most instructive conversation he
ever heard among the young men of his own age who hung about
the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel chien de pays!"
or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, moncher!" No one wanted to
discuss affairs; still less to give or get information. That was the
affair of their chiefs, who were also slow to assume work not spe-
cially ordered from their Courts. If the American Minister was in
trouble to-day, the Russian Ambassador was in trouble yesterday,
ii8 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
and the Frenchman would be in trouble to-morrow. It would all
come in the day's work. There was nothing professional in worry,
^impires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were al-
ways picking them up.
This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff.
His social education was more barren still, and more trying to his
vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe
with torture. He never forgot the first two or three social functions
he attended : one an afternoon at Miss Burdett Coutts's in Strat-
ton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and
hoped that no one noticed him; another was a garden-party given
by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of Sutherland at Chis-
wick, where -the American Minister and Mrs. Adams were kept
in conversation by the old Duchess till every one else went away
except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to playing leap-
frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty years Henry
Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly
enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another nightmare he
suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somer-
set, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him
to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gen-
try, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner.
'This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned
to ashes.
When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his
solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the
Times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for
Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this
is history and can be read by public schools if they choose; but the
curious and unexpected happened to the Legation, for the effect
of Bull Run on them was almost strengthening. They no longer
felt doubt. For the next year they went on only from week to
DIPLOMACY 119
week, ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more
than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to see them
go. ^<o_certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it./
So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or fin-
ished in the character of private secretary; and as about to begin,
without further experiment, a final education in the ranks of the
Army of the Potomac where he would find most of his friends
enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this idea
uppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn,
and began the winter. Any winter in London is a severe trial;
one's first winter is the most trying; but the month of December,
1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a
glutton of gloom.
One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence
of the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's tele-
gram announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British
mail-steamer was brought to the office. All three secretaries, pub-
lic and private were there nervous as wild beasts under the
long strain on their endurance and all three, though they
knew it to be not merely their order of departure not merely
diplomatic rupture but a declaration of war broke into
shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They saw it
and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for its own mo-
ment to strike, they were eager to strike first.
They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying
with Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams
took it, is told in the " Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E.
Forster who was one of the Fryston party. The moment was for
him the crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries it was
merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they
were a military outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned
position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort
I2O THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog
was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Lon-
doner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source
of comfort denied to them he should not be private secretary
long.
He was mistaken of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same
mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was
nothing but one of many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate
round hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal
to him which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these,
and to him the most important, was to put an end forever to the
idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an independent and free
citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he had kept up his
relations with the American press. He had written pretty fre-
quently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times.. He had also become fairly intimate with
the two or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News,
the Star, the weekly Spectator ; and he had tried to give them news
and views that should have a certain common character, and pre-
vent clash. He had even gone down to Manchester to study the
cotton famine, and wrote a long account of his visit which his
brother Charles had published in the Boston Courier. Unfortu-
nately it was printed with his name, and instantly came back upon
him in the most crushing shape possible that of a long, satiri-
cal leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did not know
its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the Legation, and
lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he instantly learned
the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one of the tradi-
tional busy-bodies of politics, who had haunted London since
1830, and who, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them all
they did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to
tell Adams all he did not want to know about the Times. For a
DIPLOMACY 121
moment Adams thought his "usefulness" at an end in other re-
spects than in the press, but a day or two more taught him the
value of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had not even a
club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the Times
article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and the world
had other persons such as President Lincoln, Secretary Sew-
ard, and Commodore Wilkes for constant and favorite ob-
jects of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be
useful again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His
education at least had reached the point of seeing its own pro-
portions. "Surtout point de zcle!" Zeal was too hazardous a pro-
fession for a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator,
among Trent Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters
and meddled with no more newspapers, but he was still young,
and felt unkindly towards the editor of the London Times.
Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the Trent
Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its sur-
prise, still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this
delay which he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense no
reason for changing his opinion about the views of the British
Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his table,
and go on copying papers, filing letters, and reading newspaper
accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the brutality of
Mr. Seward or vice versa. The heavy months dragged on and
winter slowly turned to spring without improving his position or
spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to the end of life, he
never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During this tedi-
ous winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of
sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the
guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix.
His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers, al-
though old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were
strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be
122 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper Gros-
venor Street were certainly the best in London; but none offered
a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first time,
the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of
the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself as closely
as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy, and he
had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to understand
that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most required
was that of ^charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis, a dozen
years older than himself, could have good-naturedly trained a
school of such, without an effort, and with infinite advantage to
them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of Portland Place.
During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this social polar
winter, the single source of warmth and light.
Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such pres-
sure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates made
common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was
merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the
younger members of the household, it was not quite so with the
Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they
gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with Ameri-
can sources, British society had begun with violent social pre-
judice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders
except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been
for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the Brit-
ish mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own in-
terests, the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself
that this new British prejudice was natural. The private secre-
tary suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had some-
thing to do with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall.
Naturally the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarse-
ness. Had Lincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the
average Englishman would have liked them the better. The ex-
ceedingly quiet manner and the unassailable social position of
DIPLOMACY 123
Minister Adams in no way conciliated them. CDiey c Hos^toJgnojre
Jiinv-siaGe_they^cQuld noLndicule him. Lord John Russell set the
example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politi-
cally he was negligible; be was there to be put aside. London and
Paris imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln and
his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister
Adams would vanish with the rest.
This situation made Minister Adams an exception among dip-
lomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated as
members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of
total extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe, for
a year at least, regarded the Washington Government as dead,
and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better received
than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by little,
in private, society took the habit of accepting him, not so much
as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition, or an emi-
nent counsel retained for a foreign Government. He was to be
received and considered; to be cordially treated as, by birth and
manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of get-
ting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible advan-
tage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language, birth,
habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in order
to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams
apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society
few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double
personality and corresponding double weight.
The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock
of the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton
Milnes and William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him.
Both Milnes and Forster needed support and were greatly re-
lieved to be supported. They saw what the private secretary in
May had overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the
American Minister made a mistake, and, since his strength was
124 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
theirs, they lost no time in expressing to all the world their esti-
mate of the Minister's character. Between them the Minister was
almost safe.
One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences
of different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London,
possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for
in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a
large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes.
Every bore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes,"
the "cool of the evening"; and of course he himself affected social
eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who
knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men
of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation
to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian
mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high
intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had
written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which
were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made
speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high
for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who
went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and had
the ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social position
of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house in Upper
Brook Street to which most clever people were exceedingly glad
of admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no one liked to
decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous to show timidity
than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a strong critic,
an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of books, but
above all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved the
contacts perhaps the collisions of society. Not even Henry
Brougham dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff.
Milnes was the good-nature of London; the Gargantuan type of its
refinement and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.
DIPLOMACY 125
Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or Ven-
ables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E.
Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever
to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was
quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or
political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety;
he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of
self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to
hold dear the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal,
emotional, almost sentimental nature. Kindly he had to be, if
only by his inheritance from a Quaker ancestry, but he was a
Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and emotional he must
have been, or he could never have persuaded a daughter of Dr.
Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace of base metal;
honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union cause and made
himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sure to do,
partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partly
because it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a new
member, he needed a field.
Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership,
and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament
as for work. With such a manager, the friends of the Union in
England began to take heart. Minister Adams had only to look
on as his true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action,
and even the private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam
of encouragement as he saw the ring begin to clear for these burly
Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely to be as brutal as
ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not exactly
light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters in
England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle
even Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen,
and even in Parliament they had no large following. They were
126 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
classed as enemies of order, anarchists, and anarchists they
were if hatred of the so-called established orders made them so.
About them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly
the side of the Union against Palmerston whom they hated.
Strangers to London society, they were at home in the American
Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking always with reckless
freedom. Cobden was the milder and more persuasive; Bright
was the more dangerous to approach; but the private secretary
delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them talk
the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the
House.
With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a
little ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends
gathered about the Legation who were no fair-weather compan-
ions. The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned
out to be an annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of
Argyll was one of the most valuable friends the Minister found,
both politically and socially, and the Duchess was as true as her
mother. Even the private secretary shared faintly in the social
profit of this relation, and never forgot dining one night at the
Lodge, and finding himself after dinner engaged in instructing
John Stuart Mill about the peculiar merits of an American pro-
tective system. In spite of all the probabilities, he convinced
himself that it was not the Duke's claret which led him to this
singular form of loquacity; he insisted that it was the fault of Mr.
Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his point of view.
Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in that re-
spect the Duke would perhaps have done better; but the secre-
tary had to admit that though at other periods of life he was
sufficiently and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could
never recall a single occasion during this trying year, when he
had to complain of rudeness.
DIPLOMACY 127
Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either
men or women; although not even this rule was quite exact,
for Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made
Devonshire House almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent
Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of
Alderley whose house was one of the most frequented in London.
Lome, too, the future Argyll, was always a friend. Yet the regu-
lar course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir Charles
Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which young Adams
was asked, and with which his friendly relations never ceased for
near half a century, and then only when death stopped them.
Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came
into close alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors
after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary
occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no more effort
of any kind, but silently waited the end. Whatever might be the
advantages of social relations to his father and mother, to him the
whole business of diplomacy and society was futile. He meant
to go home.
CHAPTER IX
FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
OF the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without
a shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him;
already in his short life he was used to seeing people wade
in blood, and he could plainly discern in history, that man from
the beginning had found his chief amusement in bloodshed; but
the ferocious joy of destruction at its best requires that one should
kill what one hates, and young Adams neither hated nor wanted
to kill his friends the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as
to wipe England off the earth. Never could any good come from
that besotted race! He was feebly trying to save his own life.
Every day the British Government deliberately crowded him one
step further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knew it;
no one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent
Affair showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape
of the rebel cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes,
the sign of hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to in-
tervene. Lord Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were dis-
courteous in their indifference, and, to an irritable young private
secretary of twenty-four, were insolent in their disregard of truth.
Whatever forms of phrase were usual in public to modify the harsh-
ness of invective, in private no political opponent in England, and
few political friends, hesitated to say brutally of Lord John Russell
that he lied. This was no great reproach, for, more or less, every
statesman lied, but the intensity of the private secretary's rage
sprang from his belief that Russell's form of defence covered intent
to kill. Not for an instant did the Legation draw a free breath.
The suspense was hideous and unendurable.
The Minister, no doubt, endured it, but he had support and
consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his
FOES OR FRIENDS 129
friends who were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps
about Richmond, or his enemies who were exulting in Pall Mall.
He bore it as well as he could till midsummer, but, when the
story of the second Bull Run appeared, he could bear it no longer,
and after a sleepless night, walking up and down his room without
reflecting that his father was beneath him, he announced at break-
fast his intention to go home into the army. His mother seemed
to be less impressed by the announcement than by the walking
over her head, which was so unlike her as to surprise her son. His
father, too, received the announcement quietly. No doubt they
expected it, and had taken their measures in advance. In those
days, parents got used to all sorts of announcements from their
children. Mr. Adams took his son's defection as quietly as he
took Bull Run; but his son never got the chance to go. He found
obstacles constantly rising in his path. The remonstrances of his
brother Charles, who was himself in the Army of the Potomac,
and whose opinion had always the greatest weight with Henry,
had much to do with delaying action; but he felt, of his own ac-
cord, that if he deserted his post in London, and found the Capuan
comforts he expected in Virginia where he would have only bullets
to wound him, he would never forgive himself for leaving his father
and mother alone to be devoured by the wild beasts of the British
amphitheatre. This reflection might not have stopped him, but
his father's suggestion was decisive. The Minister pointed out
that it was too late for him to take part in the actual campaign,
and that long before next spring they would all go home together.
The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel
cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again
to copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a con-
tinuous supply. Properly, the affidavits were no business of the
private secretary, but practically the private secretary did a
second secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would save
Mr. Seward the trouble of sending more secretaries of his own
selection to help the Minister. The work was nothing, and no one
130 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ever complained of it; not even Moran, the Secretary of Legation
after the departure of Charley Wilson, though he might sit up all
night to copy. Not the work, but the play exhausted. The effort
of facing a hostile society was bad enough, but that of facing
friends was worse. After terrific disasters like the seven days before
Richmond and the second Bull Run, friends needed support; a
tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the average mind sees
quickest through a bluff; nothing answers but candor; yet private
secretaries never feel candid, however much they feel the reverse,
and therefore they must affect candor; not always a simple act
when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and choking with tears
over the blunders and incapacity of one's Government. n_one
^shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow. Least of all, must
one throw extra strain on the Minister, who had all he could carry
without being fretted in his family. One must read one's Times
every morning over one's muffin without reading aloud "An-
other disastrous Federal Defeat"; and one might not even indulge
in harmless profanity. Self-restraint among friends required much
more effort than keeping a quiet face before enemies. Great men
were the worst blunderers. One day the private secretary smiled,
when standing with the crowd in the throne-room while the end-
less procession made bows to the royal family, at hearing, behind
his shoulder, one Cabinet Minister remark gaily to another: "So
the Federals have got another licking!" The point of the remark
was its truth. Even a private secretary had learned to control his
tones and guard his features and betray no joy over the "lickings"
of an enemy in the enemy's presence.
London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial;
it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abra-
ham Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible
more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two
men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless;
explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust itself.
One's best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for the belief
FOES OR FRIENDS 131
in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality and Seward's ferocity became a
dogma of popular faith. The last time Henry Adams saw Thack-
eray, before his sudden death at Christmas in 1863, was in enter-
ing the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening reception.
Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing because,
in his usual blind way, he had stumbled into the wrong house and
not found it out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he
knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his
tone changed as he spoke of his and Adams's friend, Mrs.
Frank Hampton, of South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally
Baxter and painted as Ethel Newcome. Though he had never
quite forgiven her marriage, his warmth of feeling revived when
he heard that she had died of consumption at Columbia while
her parents and sister were refused permission to pass through
the lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice trembled
and his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln and his
hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals made
a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of women partic-
ularly of women in order to punish their opponents. On quite
insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had Adams
carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was unjust, he
would have gained nothing by showing them. At that moment
Thackeray, and all London society with him, needed the nervous
relief of expressing emotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not what they
said he was what were they?
For like reason, the members of the Legation kept silence, even
in private, under the boorish Scotch jibes of Carlyle. If Carlyle
was wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this
measure would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more
sincere or more sound in one thought than in another. The proof
that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt
to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself. Demolition of
one's idols is painful, and Carlyle had been an idol. Doubts cast
on his stature spread far into general darkness like shadows of a
132 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
setting sun. Not merely the idols fell, but also the habit of faith.
If Carlyle, too, was a fraud, what were his scholars and school?
Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to com-
plain than every other diplomatist has had, in like conditions, but
one's few friends in society were mere ornament. The Legation
could not dream of contesting social control. The best they could
do was to escape mortification, and by this time their relations
were good enough to save the Minister's family from that annoy-
ance. Now and then, the fact could not be wholly disguised that
some one had refused to meet or to receive the Minister; but
never an open insult, or any expression of which the Minister had
to take notice. Diplomacy served as a buffer in times of irrita-
tion, and no diplomat who knew his business fretted at what every
diplomat and none more commonly than the English had to
expect; therefore Henry Adams, though not a diplomat and wholly
unprotected, went his way peacefully enough, seeing clearly that
society cared little to make his acquaintance, but seeing also no
reason why society should discover charms in him of which he was
himself unconscious. He went where he was asked; he was always
courteously received; he was, on the whole, better treated than at
Washington; and he held his tongue.
For a thousand reasons, the best diplomatic house in London
was Lord Palmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the
worst. Of neither host could a private secretary expect to know
anything. He might as well have expected to know the Grand
Lama. Personally Lord Palmerston was the last man in London
that a cautious private secretary wanted to know. Other Prime
Ministers may perhaps have lived who inspired among diplo-
matists as much distrust as Palmerston, and yet between Palmer-
ston's word and Russell's word, one hesitated to decide, and gave
years of education to deciding, whether either could be trusted,
or how far. The Queen herself in her famous memorandum of
August 12, 1850, gave her opinion of Palmerston in words that dif-
fered little from words used by Lord John Russell, and both the
FOES OR FRIENDS 133
Queen and Russell said in substance only what Cobden and Bright
said in private. Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the
diplomatic standard of trust seemed to be other than the par-
liamentarian. No professional diplomatists worried about false-
hoods. Words were with them forms of expression which varied
with individuals, but falsehood was more or less necessary to all.
The worst liars were the candid. What diplomatists wanted to
know was the motive that lay beyond the expression. In the case
of Palmerston they were unanimous in warning new colleagues
that they might expect to be sacrificed by him to any momentary
personal object. Every new Minister or Ambassador at the Court
of St. James received this preliminary lesson that he must, if pos-
sible, keep out of Palmerston's reach. The rule was not secret or
merely diplomatic. The Queen herself had emphatically expressed
the same opinion officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain,
he would go down to the House of Commons and betray or mis-
represent a foreign Minister, without concern for his victim. No
one got back on him with a blow equally mischievous not even
the Queen for, as old Baron Brunnow described him: "C'est
une peau de rhinocere!" Having gained his point, he laughed,
and his public laughed with him, for the usual British or Amer-
ican public likes to be amused, and thought it very amus-
ing to see these beribboned and bestarred foreigners caught and
tossed and gored on the horns of this jovial, slashing, devil-may-
care British bull.
Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is their
own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them; but they
complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to lay traps.
He was the enfant terrible oi the British Government. On the other
hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and loyal. All
the diplomats and their wives seemed to think so, and took their
troubles to her, believing that she would try to help them. For
this reason among others, her evenings at home Saturday Re-
views, they were called had great vogue. An ignorant young
134 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
American could not be expected to explain it. Cambridge House
was no better for entertaining than a score of others. Lady Pal-
merston was no longer young or handsome, and could hardly at
any age have been vivacious. The people one met there were never
smart and seldom young; they were largely diplomatic, and dip-
lomats are commonly dull; they were largely political, and poli-
ticians rarely decorate or beautify an evening party; they were
sprinkled with literaiy people, who are notoriously unfashion-
able; the women were of course ill-dressed and middle-aged; the
men looked mostly bored or out of place; yet, beyond a doubt, Cam-
bridge House was the best, and perhaps the only political house
in London, and its success was due to Lady Palmerston, who never
seemed to make an effort beyond a friendly recognition. As a les-
son in social education, Cambridge House gave much subject for
thought. First or last, one was to know dozens of statesmen more
powerful and more agreeable than Lord Palmerston; dozens of
ladies more beautiful and more painstaking than Lady Palmer-
ston; but no political house so successful as Cambridge House.
The world never explains such riddles. The foreigners said only
that Lady Palmerston was "sympathique."
The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or toler-
ated, without a further effort to recognize their existence, but they
were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and there
they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop or even
a duke. This was the social diversion of young Adams. No one
knew him not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening he
ever attended, he gave his name as usual at the foot of the stair-
case, and was rather disturbed to hear it shouted up as "Mr.
Handrew Hadams!" He tried to correct it, and the footman
shouted more loudly: "Mr. Hanthony Hadams I' 9 With some
temper he repeated the correction, and was finally announced as
"Mr. Halexander Hadams," and under this name made his bow
for the last time to Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.
Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as
FOES OR FRIENDS 135
he stood at the door receiving his guests, talking probably to one
of his henchmen, Delane, Borthwick, or Hayward, who were sure
to be near. The laugh was singular, mechanical, wooden, and did
not seem to disturb his features. "Ha! ... Ha! ... Ha!" Each
was a slow, deliberate ejaculation, and all were in the same tone,
as though he meant to say: "Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes!" by way of
assurance. It was a laugh of 1810 and the Congress of Vienna.
Adams would have much liked to stop a moment and ask whether
William Pitt and the Duke of Wellington had laughed so; but
young men attached to foreign Ministers asked no questions at all
of Palmerston and their chiefs asked as few as possible. One made
the usual bow and received the usual glance of civility; then passed
on to Lady Palmerston, who was always kind in manner, but who
wasted no remarks; and so to Lady Jocelyn with her daughter,
who commonly had something friendly to say; then went through
the diplomatic corps, Brunnow, Musurus, Azeglio, Apponyi, Van
de Weyer, Bille, Tricoupi, and the rest, finally dropping into the
hands of some literary accident as strange there as one's self. The
routine varied little. There was no attempt at entertainment.
Except for the desperate isolation of these two first seasons, even
secretaries would have found the effort almost as mechanical as a
levee at St. James's Palace.
Lord Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary; he was Prime Min-
ister, but he loved foreign affairs and could no more resist scoring
a point in diplomacy than in whist. Ministers of foreign powers,
knowing his habits, tried to hold him at armsMength, and, to do
this, were obliged to court the actual Foreign Secretary, Lord John
Russell, who, on July 30, 1861, was called up to the House of Lords
as an earl. By some process of personal affiliation, Minister Adams
succeeded in persuading himself that he could trust Lord Russell
more safely than Lord Palmerston. His son, being young and ill-
balanced in temper, thought there was nothing to choose. Eng-
lishmen saw little difference between them, and Americans were
bound to follow English experience in English character. Minister
136 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Adams had much to learn, although with him as well as with his
son, the months of education began to count as aeons.
Just as Brunnow predicted, Lord Palmerston made his rush at
last, as unexpected as always, and more furiously than though
still a private secretary of twenty-four. Only a man who had been
young with the battle of Trafalgar could be fresh and jaunty to
that point, but Minister Adams was not in a position to sympa-
thize with octogenarian youth and found himself in a danger as
critical as that of his numerous predecessors. It was late one after-
noon in June, 1862, as the private secretary returned, with the
Minister, from some social function, that he saw his father pick up
a note from his desk and read it in silence. Then he said curtly:
"Palmerston wants a quarrel!" This was the point of the inci-
dent as he felt it. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; he must not be
gratified; he must be stopped. The matter of quarrel was General
Butler's famous woman-order at New Orleans, but the motive was
the belief in President Lincoln's brutality that had taken such
deep root in the British mind. Knowing Palmerston's habits, the
Minister took for granted that he meant to score a diplomatic
point by producing this note in the House of Commons. If he did
this at once, the Minister was lost; the quarrel was made; and one
new victim to Palmerston's passion for popularity was sacrificed.
The moment was nervous as far as the private secretary
knew, quite the most critical moment in the records of American
diplomacy but the story belongs to history, not to education,
and can be read there by any one who cares to read it. As a part
of Henry Adams's education it had a value distinct from history.
That his father succeeded in muzzling Palmerston without a pub-
lic scandal, was well enough for the Minister, but was not enough
for a private secretary who liked going to Cambridge House, and
was puzzled to reconcile contradictions. That Palmerston had
wanted a quarrel was obvious; why, then, did he submit so tamely
to being made the victim of the quarrel? The correspondence that
followed his note was conducted feebly on his side, and he allowed
FOES OR FRIENDS 137
the United States Minister to close it by a refusal to receive further
communications from him except through Lord Russell. The step
was excessively strong, for it broke off private relations as well
as public, and cost even the private secretary his invitations to
Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried her best, but the two
ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do with
an American Minister perplexed in the extreme. Not that Mr.
Adams lost his temper, for he never felt such a weight of respon-
sibility, and was never more cool ; but he could conceive no other
way of protecting his Government, not to speak of himself, than
to force Lord Russell to interpose. He believed that Palmerston's
submission and silence were due to Russell. Perhaps he was right;
at the time, his son had no doubt of it, though afterwards he felt
less sure. Palmerston wanted a -quarrel; the motive seemed evi-
dent; yet when the quarrel was made, he backed out of it; for some
reason it seemed that he did not want it at least, not then. He
never showed resentment against Mr. Adams at the time or after-
wards. He never began another quarrel. Incredible as it seemed,
he behaved like a well-bred gentleman who felt himself in the
wrong. Possibly this change may have been due to Lord Russell's
remonstrances, but the private secretary would have felt his edu-
cation in politics more complete had he ever finally made up his
mind whether Palmerston was more angry with General Butler,
or more annoyed at himself, for committing what was in both
cases an unpardonable betise.
At the time, the question was hardly raised, for no one doubted
Palmerston's attitude or his plans. The season was near its end,
and Cambridge House was soon closed. The Legation had trou-
bles enough without caring to publish more. The tide of English
feeling ran so violently against it that one could only wait to see
whether General McClellan would bring it relief. The year 1862
was a dark spot in Henry Adams's life, and the education it gave
was mostly one that he gladly forgot. As far as he was aware, he
made no friends; he could hardly make enemies; yet towards the
138 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
close of the year he was flattered by an invitation from Monck-
ton Milnes to Fryston, and it was one of many acts of charity to-
wards the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes made it
his business to be kind. Other people criticised him for his man-
ner of doing it, but never imitated him. Naturally, a dispirited,
disheartened private secretary was exceedingly grateful, and never
forgot the kindness, but it was chiefly as education that this
first country visit had value. Commonly, country visits are much
alike, but Monckton Milnes was never like anybody, and his
country parties served his purpose of mixing strange elements.
Fryston was one of a class of houses that no one sought for its nat-
ural beauties, and the winter mists of Yorkshire were rather more
evident for the absence of the hostess on account of them, so that
the singular guests whom Milnes collected to enliven his Decem-
ber had nothing to do but astonish each other, if anything could
astonish such men. Of the five, Adams alone was tame; he alone
added nothing to the wit or humor, except as a listener; but they
needed a listener and he was useful. Of the remaining four, Milnes
was the oldest, and perhaps the sanest in spite of his superficial
eccentricities, for Yorkshire sanity was true to a standard of its
own, if not to other conventions ; yet even Milnes startled a young
American whose Boston and Washington mind was still fresh.
He would not have been startled by the hard-drinking, horse-
racing Yorkshi reman of whom he had read in books; but Milnes
required a knowledge of society and literature that only himself
possessed, if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had sought
contact with everybody and everything that Europe could offer.
He knew it all from several points of view, and chiefly as hu-
morous.
The second of the party was also of a certain age; a quiet, well-
mannered, singularly agreeable gentleman of the literary class.
When Milnes showed Adams to his room to dress for dinner, he
stayed a moment to say a word about this guest, whom he called
Stirling of Keir. His sketch closed with the hint that Stirling was
FOES OR FRTENDS 139
violent only on one point hatred of Napoleon III. On that
point, Adams was himself sensitive, which led him to wonder how
bad the Scotch gentleman might be. The third was a man of
thirty or thereabouts, whom Adams had already met at Lady
Palmerston's carrying his arm in a sling. His figure and bearing
were sympathetic almost pathetic with a certain grave and
gentle charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He
was Laurence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been
wounded in the fanatics' attack on the British Legation. He
seemed exceptionally sane and peculiarly suited for country
houses, where every man would enjoy his company, and every
woman would adore him. He had not then published "Picca-
dilly"; perhaps he was writing it; while, like all the young men
about the Foreign Office, he contributed to The Owl.
The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact
a year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action and
in this trait, was remotely followed, a generation later, by an-
other famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson a tropical
bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utter-
ance and screams of humor, quite unlike any English lark or night-
ingale. One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls,
and yet no ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him
as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes
was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them cur-
rency. He had unearthed Henry Adams who knew himself to be
worthless and not current. When Milnes lingered a moment in
Adams's room to add that Swinburne had written some poetry,
not yet published, of really extraordinary merit, Adams only
wondered what more Milnes would discover, and whether by
chance he could discover merit in a private secretary. He was
capable of it.
In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with the
usual club manners of ladyless dinner-tables, easy and formal at
the same time. Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his
140 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other
channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out.
Then, at last, if never before, Adams acquired education. What
he had sought so long, he found; but he was none the wiser; only
the more astonished. For once, too, he felt at ease, for the others
were no less astonished than himself, and their astonishment grew
apace. For the rest of the evening Swinburne figured alone; the
end of dinner made the monologue only freer, for in 1862, even
when ladies were not in the house, smoking was forbidden, and
guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; but Monck-
ton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in
Adams's bedroom, since Adams was an American-German bar-
barian ignorant of manners; and there after dinner all sat
or lay till far into the night, listening to the rush of Swinburne's
talk. In a long experience, before or after, no one ever approached
it; yet one had heard accounts of the best talking of the time, and
read accounts of talkers in all time, among the rest, of Voltaire,
who seemed to approach nearest the pattern.
That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-
of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite origi-
nal, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll,
Adams could see; .but what more he was, even Milnes hardly
dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and
knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his fac-
ulty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, for-
ward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon,
or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of his rhetorical
recitation of his own unpublished ballads "Faustine"; the
"Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of Burdens"
which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad. It
was singular that his most appreciative listener should have been
the author only of pretty verses like " We wandered by the brook-
side," and "She seemed to those that saw them meet"; and who
never cared to write in any other tone; but Milnes took everything
FOES OR FRIENDS 141
into his sympathies, including Americans like young Adams whose
standards were stiffest of all, while Swinburne, though millions
of ages far from them, united them by his humor .even more than
by his poetry. The story of his first day as a member of Profes-
sor Stubbs's household was professionally clever farce, if not high
comedy, in a young man who could write a Greek ode or a Pro-
ven^al chanson as easily as an English quatrain.
Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir
wanted to take with him to his chamber a copy of " Queen Rosa-
mund, " the only volume Swinburne had then published, which
was on the library table, and Adams offered to light him down
with his solitary bedroom candle. All the way, Stirling was ejacu-
lating explosions of wonder, until at length, at the foot of the stairs
"and at the climax gf his imagination, he paused, and burst out:
"He's a cross between the devil and the Duke of Argyll!"
To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious
critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only
one at least in person but he understood that to a Scotch-
man the likeness meant something quite portentous, beyond
English experience, supernatural, and what the French call moy-
enageux, or mediaeval with a grotesque turn. That Stirling as well
as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly com-
forted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to
imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muf-
fins and pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of dys-
pepsia. The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns
slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.
Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius
never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its utter-
most flights, was never moyenageux. One felt the horror of Long-
fellow and Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of
Holmes, at the wild Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What
could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his
good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend
142 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry
Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams could no more
interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's
comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The
quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched
there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could
only receive; one had nothing to give nothing even to offer.
Swinburne tested him then and there by one of his favorite
tests Victor Hugo; for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the
surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe
exercise for foreigners; it requires extraordinary knowledge of the
language and rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recita-
tion of French verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks some-
thing of poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he
never listened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense
of majesty in French verse; but he did not care to proclaim
his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's vehement in-
sistence by parading an affection for Alfred de Musset. Swin-
burne would have none of it; de Musset was unequal; he did not
sustain himself on the wing.
Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to
sustain himself on the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo; but
his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he succumbed.
Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In truth
the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's Eng-
lish the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's
failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to
admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was
needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost.
The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He
knew his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly
mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was
no companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an an-
noyance; no number of centuries could ever educate him to Swin-
FOES OR FRIENDS 143
burne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often won-
dered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth
the poet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the Ameri-
can insect would have been only too happy to bring, had he known
how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France
is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became absurd.
Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendors of Hugo and
Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in
personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him
at the Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with de-
light at a call he had made on Hugo: "I was shown into a large
room," he said, "with women and men seated in chairs against
the walls, and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last
Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and uttered the words: 'Quant
a moi, je crois en Dieu!' Silence followed. Then a woman re-
sponded as if in deep meditation: 'Chose sublime! un Dieu qui
croit en Dieu!'"
With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the
actors had not the instinct of the drama; and yet even a private
secretary was not wholly wanting in instinct. As soon as he
reached town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of "Queen
Rosamund," and at that time, if Swinburne was not joking,
Pickering had sold seven copies. When the "Poems and Ballads"
came out, and met their great success and scandal, he sought one
of the first copies from Moxon. If he had sinned and doubted at
all, he wholly repented and did penance before "Atalanta in
Calydon," and would have offered Swinburne a solemn worship
as Milnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the
poet. Unfortunately it was worthless.
The three young men returned to London, and each went his
own way. Adams's interest in making friends was something
desperate, but "the London season," Milnes used to say, "is a
season for making acquaintances and losing friends"; there was
no intimate life. Of Swinburne he saw no more till Monckton
144 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Milnes summoned his whole array of Frystonians to support him
in presiding at the dinner of the Authors' Fund, when Adams
found himself seated next to Swinburne, famous then, but no
nearer. They never met again. Oliphant he met oftener; all the
world knew and loved him; but he too disappeared in the way
that all the world knows. Stirling of Keir, after one or two efforts,
passed also from Adams's vision into Sir William Stirling-Max-
well. The only record of his wonderful visit to Fryston may
perhaps exist still in the registers of the St. James's Club, for im-
mediately afterwards Milnes proposed Henry Adams for mem-
bership, and unless his memory erred, the nomination was sec-
onded by Tricoupi and endorsed by Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn
Ashley. The list was a little singular for variety, but on the whole
it suggested that the private secretary was getting on.
CHAPTER X
POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward, in-
quired whether Minister Adams would like the place of
Assistant Secretary for his son. It was the first and
last office ever offered him, if indeed he could claim what was
offered in fact to his father. To them both, the change seemed
useless. Any young man could make some sort of Assistant Secre-
tary; only one, just at that moment, could make an Assistant Son.
More than half his duties were domestic; they sometimes required
long absences; they always required independence of the Govern-
ment service. His position was abnormal. The British Govern-
ment by courtesy allowed the son to go to Court as Attache,
though he was never attached, and after five or six years' tolera-
tion, the decision was declared irregular. In the Legation, as pri-
vate secretary, he was liable to do Secretary's work. In society,
when official, he was attached to the Minister; when unofficial,
he was a young man without any position at all. As the years
went on, he began to find advantages in having no position at
all except that of young man. Gradually he aspired to become a
gentleman; just a member of society like the rest. The position
was irregular; at that time many positions were irregular; yet it
lent itself to a sort of irregular education that seemed to be the
only sort of education the young man was ever to get.
Such as it was, few young men had more. The spring and
summer of 1863 saw a great change in Secretary Seward's manage-
ment of foreign affairs. Under the stimulus of danger, he too got
education. He felt, at last, that his official representatives abroad
needed support. Officially he could give them nothing but des-
patches, which were of no great value to any one; and at best the
mere weight of an office had little to do with the public. Govern-
ments were made to deal with Governments, not with private
146 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
individuals or with the opinions of foreign society. In order to
affect European opinion, the weight of American opinion had to
be brought to bear personally, and had to be backed by the weight
of American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously to work and
sent over every important American on whom he could lay his
hands. All came to the Legation more or less intimately, and
Henry Adams had a chance to see them all, bankers or bishops,
who did their work quietly and well, though, to the outsider, the
work seemed wasted and the "influential classes'' more indurated
with prejudice than ever. The waste was only apparent; the work
all told in the end, and meanwhile it helped education.
Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the
Minister and to cooperate with him. The most interesting of these
was Thurlow Weed, who came to do what the private secretary
himself had attempted two years before, with boyish ignorance of
his own powers. Mr. Weed took charge of the press, and began, to
the amused astonishment of the secretaries, by making what the
Legation had learned to accept as the invariable mistake of every
amateur diplomat; he wrote letters to the London Times. Mistake
or not, Mr. Weed soon got into his hands the threads of manage-
ment, and did quietly and smoothly all that was to be done. With
his work the private secretary had no connection; it was he that
interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete American education
in himself. His mind was naturally strong and beautifully bal-
anced; his temper never seemed ruffled; his manners were care-
fully perfect in the style of benevolent simplicity, the tradition of
Benjamin Franklin. He was the model of political management
and patient address; but the trait that excited enthusiasm in a
private secretary was his faculty of irresistibly conquering confi-
dence. Of all flowers in the garden of education, confidence was
becoming the rarest; but before Mr. Weed went away, young
Adams followed him about not only obediently for obedience
had long since become a blind instinct but rather with sym-
pathy and affection, much like a little dog.
POLITICAL MORALITY 147
The sympathy was not due only to Mr. Weed's skill of manage-
ment, although Adams never met another such master, or any one
who approached him; nor was the confidence due to any display
of professions, either moral or social, by Mr. Weed. The trait
that astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparent un-
selfishness. Never, in any man who wielded such power, did
Adams meet anything like it. The effect of power and publicity
on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends
by killing the victim's sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a
passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expres-
sions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates;
and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a rare immune.
He thought apparently not of himself, but of the person he was
talking with. He held himself naturally in the background. He
was not jealous. He grasped power, but not office. He distributed
offices by handfuls without caring to take them. He had the
instinct of empire: he gave, but he did not receive. This rare
superiority to the politicians he controlled, a trait that private
secretaries never met in the politicians themselves, excited Adams's
wonder and curiosity, but when he tried to get behind it, and to
educate himself from the stores of Mr. Weed's experience, he found
the study still more fascinating. Management was an instinct
with Mr. Weed; an object to be pursued for its own sake, as one
plays cards; but he appeared to play with men as though they
were only cards; he seemed incapable of feeling himself one of
them. He took them and played them for their face-value; but
once, when he had told, with his usual humor, some stories of his
political experience which were strong even for the Albany lobby,
the private secretary made bold to ask him outright: "Then,
Mr. Weed, do you think that no politician can be trusted?" Mr.
Weed hesitated for a monent; then said in his mild manner: "I
never advise a young man to begin by thinking so."
This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral
sepse, as though Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions 1"
148 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
As he grew older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it
as a question of how the game should be played. Young men most
needed experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a
general rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles had bet-
ter be left aside; values were enough. Adams knew that he could
never learn to play politics in so masterly a fashion as this: his
education and his nervous system equally forbade it, although he
admired all the more the impersonal faculty of the political master
who could thus efface himself and his temper in the game. He
noticed that most of the greatest politicians in history had seemed
to regard men as counters. The lesson was the more interesting
because another famous New Yorker came over at the same time
who liked to discuss the same problem. Secretary Seward sent
William M. Evarts to London as law counsel, and Henry began
an acquaintance with Mr. Evarts that soon became intimate.
Evarts was as individual as Weed was impersonal; like most men,
he cared little for the game, or how it was played, and much for
the stakes, but he played it in a large and liberal way, like Daniel
Webster, "a great advocate employed in politics." Evarts was
also an economist of morals, but with him the question was rather
how much morality one could afford. "The world can absorb
only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One
sought education in order to adjust the dose.
The teachings of Weed and Evarts were practical, and the
private secretary's life turned on their value. England's power
of absorbing truth was small. Englishmen, such as Palmerston,
Russell, Bethell, and the society represented by the Times and
Morning Post, as well as the Tories represented by Disraeli,
Lord Robert Cecil, and the Standard, offered a study in educa-
tion that sickened a young student with anxiety. He had begun
contrary to Mr. Weed's advice by taking their bad faith for
granted. Was he wrong? To settle this point became the main
object of the diplomatic education so laboriously pursued, at a
cost already stupendous, and promising to become ruinous. Life
POLITICAL MORALITY 149
changed front, according as one thought one's self dealing with
honest men or with rogues.
Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of dishonesty.
The reasons that satisfied him had not altogether satisfied his
father, and of course his father's doubts gravely shook his own
convictions, but, in practice, if only for safety, the Legation put
little or no confidence in Ministers, and there the private secre-
tary's diplomatic education began. The recognition of belligerency,
the management of the Declaration of Paris, the Trent Affair,
all strengthened the belief that Lord Russell had started in May,
1 86 1, with the assumption that the Confederacy was established;
every step he had taken proved his persistence in the same idea; he
never would consent to put obstacles in the way of recognition;
and he was waiting only for the proper moment to interpose. All
these points seemed so fixed so self-evident that no one in
the Legation would have doubted or even discussed them except
that Lord Russell obstinately denied the whole charge, and per-
sisted in assuring Minister Adams of his honest and impartial
neutrality.
With the insolence of youth and zeal, Henry Adams jumped
at once to the conclusion that Earl Russell like other statesmen
lied; and, although the Minister thought differently, he had to
act as though Russell were false. Month by month the demon-
stration followed its mathematical stages; one of the most perfect
educational courses in politics and diplomacy that a young man
ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly tutors in the world
were provided for him at public expense Lord Palmerston,
Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr. Gladstone,
Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by the British Govern-
ment; William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, William Max-
well Evarts, Thurlow Weed, and other considerable professors em-
ployed by the American Government; but there was only one
student to profit by this immense staff of teachers. The private
secretary alone sought education.
150 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught.
Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel's metaphysical
doctrine of the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to
understand. Yet the stages of demonstration were clear. They
began in June, 1862, after the escape of one rebel cruiser, by the
remonstrances of the Minister against the escape of "No. 290,"
which was imminent. Lord Russell declined to act on the evi-
dence. New evidence was sent in every few days, and with it, on
July 24, was included Collier's legal opinion: "It appears difficult
to make out a stronger case of infringement of the Foreign Enlist-
ment Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion, is little better
than a dead letter." Such language implied almost a charge of
collusion with the rebel agents an intent to aid the Confeder-
acy. In spite of the warning, Earl Russell let the ship, four days
afterwards, escape.
Young Adams had nothing to do with law; that was business of
his betters. His opinion of law hung on his opinion of lawyers.
In spite of Thurlow Weed's advice, could one afford to trust human
nature in politics? History said not. Sir Robert Collier seemed to
hold that Law agreed with History. For education the point was
vital. If one could not trust a dozen of the most respected private
characters in the world, composing the Queen's Ministry, one
could trust no mortal man.
Lord Russell felt the force of this inference, and undertook to
disprove it. His effect lasted till his death. At first he excused
himself by throwing the blame on the law officers. This was a
politician's practice, and the lawyers overruled it. Then he pleaded
guilty to criminal negligence, and said in his "Recollections":
"I assent entirely to the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice of
England that the Alabama ought to have been detained during
the four days I was waiting for the opinion of the law officers.
But I think that the fault was not that of the commissioners of
customs, it was my fault as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs."
This concession brought all parties on common ground. Of course
POLITICAL MORALITY 151
it was his fault! The true issue lay not in the question of his fault,
but of his intent. To a young man, getting an education in poli-
tics, there could be no sense in history unless a constant course of
faults implied a constant motive.
For his father the question was not so abstruse; it was a practical
matter of business to be handled as Weed or Evarts handled their
bargains and jobs. Minister Adams held the convenient belief
that, in the main, Russell was true, and the theory answered his
purposes so well that he died still holding it. His son was seeking
education, and wanted to know whether he could, in politics, risk
trusting any one. Unfortunately no one could then decide; no one
knew the facts. Minister Adams died without knowing them.
Henry Adams was an older man than his father in 1862, before
he learned a part of them. The most curious fact, even then, was
that Russell believed in his own good faith and that Argyll believed
in it also.
Argyll betrayed a taste for throwing the blame on Bethell, Lord
Westbury, then Lord Chancellor, but this escape helped Adams
not at all. On the contrary, it complicated the case of Russell.
In England, one half of society enjoyed throwing stones at Lord
Palmerston, while the other half delighted in flinging mud at Earl
Russell, but every one of every party united in pelting Westbury
with every missile at hand. The private secretary had no doubts
about him, for he never professed to be moral. He was the head
and heart of the whole rebel contention, and his opinions on neu-
trality were as clear as they were on morality. The private secre-
tary had nothing to do with him, and regretted it, for Lord West-
bury's wit and wisdom were great; but as far as his authority went,
he affirmed the law that in politics no man should be trusted.
Russell alone insisted on his honesty of intention and persuaded
both the Duke and the Minister to believe him. Every one in the
Legation accepted his assurances as the only assertions they
could venture to trust. They knew he expected the rebels to win
in the end, but they believed he would not actively interpose to
152 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
decide it. On that on nothing else they rested their frail
hopes of remaining a day longer in England. Minister Adams re-
mained six years longer in England; then returned to America to
lead a busy life till he died in 1886 still holding the same faith in
Earl Russell, who had died in 1878. In 1889, Spencer Walpole
published the official life of Earl Russell, and told a part of the
story which had never been known to the Minister and which
astounded his son, who burned with curiosity to know what his
father would have said of it.
The story was this: The Alabama escaped, by Russell's con-
fessed negligence, on July 28, 1862. In America the Union armies
had suffered great disasters before Richmond and at the second
Bull Run, August 29-30, followed by Lee's invasion of Maryland,
September 7, the news of which, arriving in England on Sep-
tember 14, roused the natural idea that the crisis was at hand.
The next news was expected by the Confederates to announce
the fall of Washington or Baltimore. Palmerston instantly, Sep-
tember 14, wrote to Russell: "If this should happen, would it
not be time for us to consider whether in such a state of things
England and France might not address the contending parties
and recommend an arrangement on the basis of separation?"
This letter, quite in the line of Palmerston's supposed opinions,
would have surprised no one, if it had been communicated to
the Legation; and indeed, if Lee had captured Washington, no
one could have blamed Palmerston for offering intervention.
Not Palmerston's letter but Russell's reply, merited the painful
attention of a young man seeking a moral standard for judging
politicians :
GOTHA, September, 17, 1862.
MY DEAR PALMERSTON :
Whether the Federal army is destroyed or not, it is clear that it
is driven back to Washington and has made no progress in subduing
the insurgent States. Such being the case, I agree with you that the
time is come for offering mediation to the United States Govern-
ment with a view to the recognition of the independence of the Con-
POLITICAL MORALITY 153
federates. I agree further that in case of failure, we ought ourselves
to recognize the Southern States as an independent State. For the
purpose of taking so important a step, I think we must have a meeting
of the Cabinet. The 23d or 3Oth would suit me for the meeting.
We ought then, if we agree on such a step, to propose it first to
France, and then on the part of England and France, to Russia and
other powers, as a measure decided upon by us.
We ought to make ourselves safe in Canada, not by sending more
troops there, but by concentrating those we have in a few defensible
posts before the winter sets in. ...
Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical difficulty
in education which a mere student could never overcome; a dif-
ficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want of experience,
but in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord Russell's course
had been consistent from the first, and had all the look of rigid
determination to recognize the Southern Confederacy "with a
view" to breaking up the Union. His letter of September 17
hung directly on his encouragement of the Alabama and his pro-
tection of the rebel navy; while the whole of his plan had its root
in the Proclamation of Belligerency, May 13, 1861. The policy
had every look of persistent forethought, but it took for granted
the deliberate dishonesty of three famous men: Palmerston, Rus-
sell, and Gladstone. This dishonesty, as concerned Russell, was
denied by Russell himself, and disbelieved by Argyll, Forster, and
most of America's friends in England, as well as by Minister
Adams. What the Minister would have thought had he seen
this letter of September 17, his son would have greatly liked to
know, but he would have liked still more to know what the Min-
ister would have thought of Palmerston's answer, dated Sep-
tember 23 :
... It is evident that a great conflict is taking place to the north-
west of Washington, and its issue must have a great effect on the state
of affairs. If the Federals sustain a great defeat, they may be at once
ready for mediation, and the iron should be struck while it is hot.
If, on the other hand, they should have the best of it, we may wait
a while and see what may follow. . .
154 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
The roles were reversed. Russell wrote what was expected
from Palmerston, or even more violently; while Palmerston wrote
what was expected from Russell, or even more temperately. The
private secretary's view had been altogether wrong, which would
not have much surprised even him, but he would have been greatly
astonished to learn that the most confidential associates of these
men knew little more about their intentions than was known in
the Legation. The most trusted member of the Cabinet was Lord
Granville, and to him Russell next wrote. Granville replied at once
decidedly opposing recognition of the Confederacy, and Russell
sent the reply to Palmerston, who returned it October 2, with the
mere suggestion of waiting for further news from America. At
the same time Granville wrote to another member of the Cabinet,
Lord Stanley of Alderley, a letter published forty years after-
wards in Granville's "Life" (i, 442) to the private secretary
altogether the most curious and instructive relic of the whole les-
son in politics :
... I have written to Johnny my reasons for thinking it decidedly
premature. I, however, suspect you will settle to do so. Pam., Johnny,
and Gladstone would be in favor of it, and probably Newcastle. I
do not know about the others. It appears to me a great mistake. . . .
Out of a Cabinet of a dozen members, Granville, the best in-
formed of them all, could pick only three who would favor recogni-
tion. Even a private secretary thought he knew as much as this,
or more. Ignorance was not confined to the young and insignifi-
cant, nor were they the only victims of blindness. Granville's let-
ter made only one point clear. He knew of no fixed policy or con-
spiracy. If any existed, it was confined to Palmerston, Russell,
Gladstone, and perhaps Newcastle. In truth, the Legation knew,
then, all that was to be known, and the true fault of education
was to suspect too much.
By that time, October 3, news of Antietam and of Lee's retreat
into Virginia had reached London. The Emancipation Proclama-
POLITICAL MORALITY 155
tion arrived. Had the private secretary known all that Granville
or Palmerston knew, he would surely have thought the danger
past, at least for a time, and any man of common sense would
have told him to stop worrying over phantoms. This healthy les-
son would have been worth much for practical education, but it
was quite upset by the sudden rush of a new actor upon the stage
with a rhapsody that made Russell seem sane, and all education
superfluous.
This new actor, as every one knows, was William Ewart Glad-
stone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. If, in the domain of
the world's politics, one point was fixed, one value ascertained,
one element serious, it was the British Exchequer; and if one man
lived who could be certainly counted as sane by overwhelming
interest, it was the man who had in charge the finances of England.
If education had the smallest value, it should have shown its
force in Gladstone, who was educated beyond all record of English
training. From him, if from no one else, the poor student could
safely learn.
Here is what he learned! Palmerston notified Gladstone, Sep-
tember 24, of the proposed intervention: "If I am not mistaken,
you would be inclined to approve such a course." Gladstone re-
plied the next day: "He was glad to learn what the Prime Minister
had told him; and for two reasons especially he desired that the
proceedings should be prompt: the first was the rapid progress of
the Southern arms and the extension of the area of Southern feel-
ing; the second was the risk of violent impatience in the cotton-
towns of Lancashire such as would prejudice the dignity and dis-
interestedness of the proffered mediation."
Had the puzzled student seen this letter, he must have con-
cluded from it that the best educated statesman England ever
produced did not know what he was talking about, an assumption
which all the world would think quite inadmissible from a private
secretary but this was a trifle. Gladstone having thus arranged,
with Palmerston and Russell, for intervention in the American
156 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
war, reflected on the subject for a fortnight from September 25
to October 7, when he was to speak on the occasion of a great
dinner at Newcastle. He decided to announce the Government's
policy with all the force his personal and official authority could
give it. This decision was no sudden impulse; it was the result of
deep reflection pursued to the last moment. On the morning of
October 7, he entered in his diary: "Reflected further on what I
should say about Lancashire and America, for both these subjects
are critical." That evening at dinner, as the mature fruit of his
long study, he deliberately pronounced the famous phrase :
. . . We know quite well that the people of the Northern States
have not yet drunk of the cup they are still trying to hold it
far from their lips which all the rest of the world see they never-
theless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery;
we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that
Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army;
they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is
more than either, they have made a nation. . . .
Looking back, forty years afterwards, on this episode, one
asked one's self painfully what sort of a lesson a young man should
have drawn, for the purposes of his education, from this world-
famous teaching of a very great master. In the heat of passion
at the moment, one drew some harsh moral conclusions: Were
they incorrect? Posed bluntly as rules of conduct, they led to the
worst possible practices. As morals, one could detect no shade of
difference between Gladstone and Napoleon except to the advan-
tage of Napoleon. The private secretary saw none; he accepted the
teacher in that sense; he took his lesson of political morality as
learned, his notice to quit as duly served, and supposed his educa-
tion to be finished.
Every one thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil.
Any intelligent education ought to end when it is complete. One
would then feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world.
The old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the ac-
POLITICAL MORALITY 157
tual drama is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue. When
the curtain fell on Gladstone's speech, any student had the right
to suppose the drama ended; none could have affirmed that it was
about to begin; that one's painful lesson was thrown away.
Even after forty years, most people would refuse to believe it;
they would still insist that Gladstone, Russell, and Palmerston
were true villains of melodrama. The evidence against Gladstone
in special seemed overwhelming. The word "must" can never
be used by a responsible Minister of one Government towards
another, as Gladstone used it. No one knew so well as he that he
and his own officials and friends at Liverpool were alone "mak-
ing" a rebel navy, and that Jefferson Davis had next to nothing
to do with it. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he was the Min-
ister most interested in knowing that Palmerston, Russell, and
himself were banded together by mutual pledge to make the
Confederacy a nation the next week, and that the Southern lead-
ers had as yet no hope of "making a nation" but in them. Such
thoughts occurred to every one at the moment and time only
added to their force. Never in the history of political turpitude
had any brigand of modern civilization offered a worse example.
The proof of it was that it outraged even Palmerston, who im-
mediately put up Sir George Cornewall Lewis to repudiate the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, against whom he turned his press at
the same time. Palmerston had no notion of letting his hand be
forced by Gladstone.
Russell did nothing of the kind; if he agreed with Palmerston,
he followed Gladstone. Although he had just created a new evan-
gel of non-intervention for Italy, and preached it like an apostle,
he preached the gospel of intervention in America as though he
were a mouthpiece of the Congress of Vienna. On October 13,
he issued his call for the Cabinet to meet, on October 23, for dis-
cussion of the "duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the most
friendly and conciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of arms."
Meanwhile Minister Adams, deeply perturbed and profoundly
158 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
anxious, would betray no sign of alarm, and purposely delayed to
ask explanation. The howl of anger against Gladstone became
louder every day, for every one knew that the Cabinet was called
for October 23, and then could not fail to decide its policy about
the United States. Lord Lyons put off his departure for America
till October 25 expressly to share in the conclusions to be dis-
cussed on October 23. When Minister Adams at last requested
an interview, Russell named October 23 as the day. To the last
moment every act of Russell showed that, in his mind, the inter-
vention was still in doubt.
When Minister Adams, at the interview, suggested that an
explanation was due him, he watched Russell with natural in-
terest, and reported thus :
. . . His lordship took my allusion at once, though not without
a slight indication of embarrassment. He said that Mr. Gladstone
had been evidently much misunderstood. I must have seen in the
newspapers the letters which contained his later explanations. That
he had certain opinions in regard to the nature of the struggle in
America, as on all public questions, just as other Englishmen had,
was natural enough. And it was the fashion here for public men to
express such as they held in their public addresses. Of course it was
not for him to disavow anything on the part of Mr. Gladstone; but
he had no idea that in saying what he had, there was a serious inten-
tion to justify any of the inferences that had been drawn from it of
a disposition in the Government now to adopt a new policy. . . .
A student trying to learn the processes of politics in a free gov-
ernment could not but ponder long on the moral to be drawn from
this "explanation" of Mr. Gladstone by Earl Russell. The point
set for study as the first condition of political life, was whether
any politician could be believed or trusted. The question which a
private secretary asked himself, in copying this despatch of Octo-
ber 24, 1862, was whether his father believed, or should believe, one
word of Lord Russell's "embarrassment." The "truth" was not
known for thirty years, but when published, seemed to be the re-
verse of Earl Russell's statement. Mr. Gladstone's speech had
POLITICAL MORALITY 159
been drawn out by Russell's own policy of intervention and had
no sense except to declare the "disposition in the Government now
to adopt" that new policy. Earl Russell never disavowed Glad-
stone, although Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall Lewis
instantly did so. As far as the curious student could penetrate the
mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed Earl Russell's intent.
As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would
decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively
honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might
be ignored as a delusion. Therefore the student felt compelled
to reach some sort of idea that should serve to bring the case within
a general law. Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He
bluntly told Russell that while he was "willing to acquit" Glad-
stone of "any deliberate intention to bring on the worst effects,"
he was bound to say that Gladstone was doing it quite as certainly
as if he had one; and to this charge, which struck more sharply at
Russell's secret policy than at Gladstone's public defence of it,
Russell replied as well as he could :
. . . His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that Lord
Palmerston and other members of the Government regretted the
speech, and Mr. Gladstone himself was not disinclined to correct,
as far as he could, the misinterpretation which had been made of it.
It was still their intention to adhere to the rule of perfect neutrality
in the struggle, and to let it come to its natural end without the
smallest interference, direct or otherwise. But he could not say what
circumstances might happen from month to month in the future.
I observed that the policy he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and
asked if I was to understand him as saying that no change of it was
now proposed. To which he gave his assent. . . .
Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that
Russell could be trusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was
the diplomatic tradition, especially held by the Russian diplomats.
Possibly it was sound, but it helped in no way the education of
a private secretary. The cat's-paw theory offered no safer clue,
160 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
than the frank, old-fashioned, honest theory of villainy. Neither
the one nor the other was reasonable.
No one ever told the Minister that Earl Russell, only a few
hours before, had asked the Cabinet to intervene, and that the
Cabinet had refused. The Minister was led to believe that the
Cabinet meeting was not held, and that its decision was informal.
Russell's biographer said that, "with this memorandum [of Rus-
sell's, dated October 13] the Cabinet assembled from all parts
of the country on October 23 ; but . . . members of the Cabinet
doubted the policy of moving, or moving at that time." The Duke
of Newcastle and Sir George Grey joined Granville in opposi-
tion. As far as known, Russell and Gladstone stood alone. "Consid-
erations such as these prevented the matter being pursued any
further."
Still no one has distinctly said that this decision was formal; per-
haps the unanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet unnec-
essary; but it is certain that, within an hour or two before or after
this decision, "his lordship said [to the United States Minister]
that the policy of the Government was to adhere to a strict neu-
trality and to leave this struggle to settle itself."- When Mr.
Adams, not satisfied even with this positive assurance, pressed for
a categorical answer: "I asked him if I was to understand that
policy as not now to be changed; he said: Yes!"
John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of Glad-
stone, "forty years afterwards, would have interested the Minister,
as well as his private secretary: "If this relation be accurate," said
Morley of a relation officially published at the time, and never
questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary did not construe strict
neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call good offices." For
a vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's construction of neutrality
mattered little to the student, who asked only Russell's intent, and
cared only to know whether his construction had any other object
than to deceive the Minister.
In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and possibly
POLITICAL MORALITY 161
Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his personal
friend Mr. Adams ; but to one who is still in the world even if not
of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell totally deceived
the private secretary, whatever he may have done to the Minister.
The policy of abstention was not settled on October 23. Only the
next day, October 24, Gladstone circulated a rejoinder to G. C.
Lewis, insisting on the duty of England, France, and Russia to
intervene by representing, "with moral authority and force, the
opinion of the civilized world upon the conditions of the case."
Nothing had been decided. By some means, scarcely accidental,
the French Emperor was led to think that his influence might
turn the scale, and only ten days after Russell's categorical
"Yes!" Napoleon officially invited him to say "No!" He was
more than ready to do so. Another Cabinet meeting was called
for November II, and this time Gladstone himself reports the
debate :
Nov. ii. We have had our Cabinet to-day and meet again to-
morrow. I am afraid we shall do little or nothing in the business of
America. But I will send you definite intelligence. Both Lords
Palmerston and Russell are right.
Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting
out his battle. However, though we decline for the moment, the
answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave the matter
very open for the future.
Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about America
public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not take it
as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act
in the matter. It will be clear that we concur with them, that the
war should cease. Palmerston gave to Russell's proposal a feeble
and half-hearted support.
Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who
looked on at this scene, was dead, the private secretary of 1862
read these lines with stupor, and hurried to discuss them with
John Hay, who was more astounded than himself. All the world
1 62 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
had been at cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and
the situation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions,
had known none of the facts. One would have done better to
draw no conclusions at all. One's diplomatic education was a
long mistake.
These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on
September 14, under the impression that the President was about
to be driven from Washington and the Army of the Potomac dis-
persed, suggested to Russell that in such a case, intervention might
be feasible. Russell instantly answered that, in any case, he wanted
to intervene and should call a Cabinet for the purpose. Palmerston
hesitated; Russell insisted; Granville protested. Meanwhile the
rebel army was defeated at Antietam, September 17, and driven
out of Maryland. Then Gladstone, October 7, tried to force
Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as a fait accompli.
Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir George Cornewall
Lewis to contradict Gladstone and treated him sharply in the
press, at the very moment when Russell was calling a Cabinet to
make Gladstone's words good. On October 23, Russell assured
Adams that no change in policy was now proposed. On the same
day he had proposed it, and was voted down. Instantly Napoleon
III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone with a proposi-
tion which had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to replace
America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence on Europe, and
to replace England in her old sovereignty of the seas, if Palmerston
would support France in Mexico. The young student of diplo-
macy, knowing Palmerston, must have taken for granted that
Palmerston inspired this motion and would support It; knowing
Russell and his Whig antecedents, he would conceive that Rus-
sell must oppose it; knowing Gladstone and his lofty principles,
he would not doubt that Gladstone violently denounced the
scheme. If education was worth a straw, this was the only ar-
rangement of persons that a trained student would imagine
POLITICAL MORALITY 163
possible, and it was the arrangement actually assumed by nine
men out of ten, as history. In truth, each valuation was false.
Palmerston never showed favor to the scheme and gave it only
"a feeble and half-hearted support." Russell gave way without
resolutely fighting out "his battle." The only resolute, vehe-
ment, conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and Jeffer-
son Davis was Gladstone.
Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders,
but to him the best part of life was throwfi away if he learned such
a lesson wrong. Henry James had not yet taught the world to read
a volume for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his burning-glass
turned on alternate sides of the same figure. Psychological study
was still simple, and at worst or at best English character
was never subtile. Surely no one would believe that complexity
was the trait that confused the student of Palmerston, Russell, and
Gladstone. Under a very strong light human nature will always
appear complex and full of contradictions, but the British states-
man would appear, on the whole, among the least complex of men.
Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by
contrast, be called complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and Glad-
stone deceived only by their simplicity. Russell was the most in-
teresting to a young man because his conduct seemed most states-
manlike. Every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to November,
1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the Union.
The only point in Russell's character about which the student
thought no doubt to be possible was its want of good faith. It was
thoroughly dishonest, but strong. Habitually Russell said one
thing and did another. He seemed unconscious of his own con-
tradictions even when his opponents pointed them out, as they
were much in the habit of doing, in the strongest language. As
the student watched him deal with the Civil War in America,
Russell alone showed persistence, even obstinacy, in a definite
determination, which he supported, as was necessary, by the usual
definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of the false-
164 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
hoods; on the contrary, he was vain of his own insight in detecting
them; but he was wholly upset by the idea that Russell should
think himself true.
Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old
school, clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods
dishonest but strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no
objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else
honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought
him true, but officially, in practice, treated him as false. Punch,
before 1862, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and
afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education stopped
there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered a rational
explanation of Earl Russell.
Palmerston was simple so simple as to mislead the student
altogether but scarcely more consistent. The world thought
him positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be cau-
tious, careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for pugna-
cious and quarrelsome; the "Lives" of Russell, Gladstone, and
Granville show him to have been good-tempered, conciliatory,
avoiding quarrels. He surprised the Minister by refusing to pur-
sue his attack on General Butler. He tried to check Russell. He
scolded Gladstone.. He discouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli
none of the English statesmen were so cautious as he in talking
of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made no professions;
concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The
most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that,
after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction of
Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit himself in error,
'and to consent in spirit for by that time he was nearly as dead
as any of them to beg his pardon.
Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions.
The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a reduction
POLITICAL MORALITY 165
to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could reach in
1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone admit-
ted, avowed, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which brought
all reason and all hope of education to a still-stand :
I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially since
it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had outlived half
a century. ... I declared in the heat of the American struggle that
Jefferson Davis had made a nation. . . . Strange to say, this declara-
tion, most unwarrantable to be made by a Minister of the Crown
with no authority other than his own, was not due to any feeling of
partisanship for the South or hostility to the North. ... I really,
though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to
all America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end. . . .
That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the facts was
the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive the gross impro-
priety of such an utterance from a Cabinet Minister of a power allied
in blood and language, and bound to loyal neutrality; the case being
further exaggerated by the fact that we were already, so to speak,
under indictment before the world for not (as was alleged) having
strictly enforced the laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruisers.
My offence was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness,
and with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it, that
my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very severe blame.
It illustrates vividly that incapacity which my mind so long retained,
and perhaps still exhibits, an incapacity of viewing subjects all
round. . . .
Long and patiently more than patiently sympatheti-
cally, did the private secretary, forty years afterwards in the
twilight of a life of study, read and re-read and reflect upon this
confession. Then, it seemed, he had seen nothing correctly at the
time. His whole theory of conspiracy of policy of logic and
connection in the affairs of man, resolved itself into " incredible
grossness." He felt no rancor, for he had won the game; he for-
gave, since he must admit, the "incapacity of viewing subjects all
round" which had so nearly cost him life and fortune; he was will-
1 66 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ing even to believe. He noted, without irritation, that Mr. Glad-
stone, in his confession, had not alluded to the understanding
between Russell, Palmerston, and himself; had even wholly left
out his most "incredible" act, his ardent support of Napoleon's
policy, a policy which even Palmerston and Russell had sup-
ported feebly, with only half a heart. All this was indifferent.
Granting, in spite of evidence, that Gladstone had no set plan of
breaking up the Union; that he was party to no conspiracy; that
he saw none of the results of his acts which were clear to every one
else; granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last
to conclude that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell
was verging on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve
what sort of education should have been the result of it? How
should it have affected one's future opinions and acts?
Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are
rough; its judgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not
have affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of
the individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
individual a single will or intention bent on breaking up
the Union "as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister
would still have found his interest in thinking Russell friendly
and Palmerston hostile. The individual would still have been
identical with the mass. The problem would have been the same;
the answer equally obscure. Every student would, like the private
secretary, answer for himself alone.
CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what
he did not see of an enemy. His son, a nervous ani-
mal, made life a terror by seeing toq much. Minister
Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom credited his oppo-
nents with greater intelligence than his own. Earl Russell suited
him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them; and in-
deed Henry Adams never saw Russell without being amused by
his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart from this shad-
owy personal relation, no doubt the Minister was diplomatically
right; he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a
friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or
false mattered less, because, in either case, the American Lega-
tion could act only as though he were false. Had the Minister
known Russell's determined effort to betray and ruin him in Oc-
tober, 1862, he could have scarcely used stronger expressions than
he did in 1863. Russell must have been greatly annoyed by Sir
Robert Collier's hint of collusion with the rebel agents in the
Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to hear the same innu-
endo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time went
on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the Ameri-
can Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for
the nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his
idee fixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint interven-
tion on November 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he re-
ceived a note from Minister Adams repeating his charges about
the Alabama, and asking in very plain language for redress.
Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to understand the force
of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it; this was one of
the points that greatly interested a student, but young men have
1 68 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
a passion for regarding their elders as senile, Jwhich was only in
parf"wariranted in this instance By observing that Russell's gen-
eration were mostly senile from youth. They had never got be-
yond 1815. Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case. Their
senility was congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford ^training and
High Church illusions, which caused wild eccentricities in his
judgment. Russell could not conceive that he had misunder-
stood and mismanaged Minister Adams from the start, and when,
after November 12, he found himself on the defensive, with Mr.
Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere confusion
and helplessness.
Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between
Russell and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal neg-
ligence. If, by an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil
enough to admit that the escape of the Alabama had been due to
criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard
to the ironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one
could be so simple as to believe that two armored ships-of-war
could be built publicly, under the eyes of the Government, and
go to sea like the Alabama, without active and incessant collu-
sion. The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumed ig-
norance, the more violently in the end, the Minister would have
to tear it off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of
Earl Russell, he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liber-
ties with him if this crisis were allowed to arrive.
As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself for
action. A campaign more beautiful better suited for train-
ing the mind of a youth eager for training has not often un-
rolled itself for study, from the beginning, before a young man
perched in so commanding a position. Very slowly, indeed, after
two years of solitude, one began to feel the first faint flush of
new and imperial life. One was twenty-five years old, and quite
ready to assert it; some of one's friends were wearing stars on
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 169
their collars; some had won stars of a more enduring kind. At
moments one's breath came quick. One began to dream the
sensation of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like
vertigo, for an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little
dazed, doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that
of any Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the
armies in the field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy
chance of what might be, if things could be rightly done, one
began to feel that, somewhere behind the chaos in Washington
power was taking shape; that it was massed and guided as it had
not been before. Men seemed to have learned their business
at a cost that ruined and perhaps too late. A private secre-
tary knew better than most people how much of the new power
was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the
diplomatic campaign had to wait for the military campaign to
lead. The student could only study.
Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows began
to fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with
incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one after another,
with the precision of machinery, the opposing mass, the world
shivered. Such development of power was unknown. The mag-
nificent resistance and the return shocks heightened the sus-
pense. During the July days Londoners were stupid with unbelief.
They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.
An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England,
for one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine
at home; but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One
had ample time to watch the process, and had even a little time to
gloat over the repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and
Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it hap-
pened that Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some
small reception at the house of Monckton Milnes. He went early
in order to exchange a word or two of congratulation before the
170 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
rooms should fill, and on arriving he found only the ladies in the
drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.
Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of
the Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young
American friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw
both arms about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of
later birth who knew too little to realize the passions of 1863
backed by those of 1813 and reenforced by those of 1763
might conceive that such publicity embarrassed a private sec-
retary who came from Boston and called himself shy; but that
evening, for the first time in his life, he happened not to be think-
ing of himself. He was thinking of Delane, whose eye caught
his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane probably regarded
it as a piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard of young
Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed
in the Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the
mind of the American Minister's son, for the British mind is the
slowest of all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the
capture of Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick
cortex of fixed ideas. Even if he had read Adams's thought, he
would have felt for it only the usual amused British contempt for
all that he had not been taught at school. It needed a whole
generation for the Times to reach Milnes's standpoint.
Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured
him that he regarded his own personal score as cleared off suf-
ficiently settled, then and there because his father had assumed
the debt, and was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself. "You
come next!" would have been the friendly warning. For nearly
a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging
itself for the collision between the Legation and Delane who stood
behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams had been steadily
strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view of the final
struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent Affair. The
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 171
work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly complete.
No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had
as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal. Con-
gress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chair-
man of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to
press assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not
an additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the Assis-
tant Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that the
Minister did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week would have done
the work as well or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk;
without express authority he could admit no one into the Lega-
tion; he strained a point already by admitting his son. Congress
and its committees were the proper judges of what was best for
the public service, and if the arrangement seemed good to them, it
was satisfactory to a private secretary who profited by it more
than they did. A great staff would have suppressed him. The
whole Legation was a sort of improvised, volunteer service, and he
was a volunteer with the rest. He was rather better off than the
rest, because he was invisible and unknown. Better or worse, he
did his work with the others, and if the secretaries made any
remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that
none would have received a moment's attention.
If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular
service, he had done great things for its support. If the Minister
had no secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he had a well-
organized press; efficient legal support; and a swarm of social allies
permeating all classes. All he needed was a victory in the field,
and Secretary Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy. Vicks-
burg and Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at the end of July,
1863, Minister Adams was ready to deal with Earl Russell or
Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Delane, or any one
else who stood in his way; and by the necessity of the case, was
obliged to deal with all of them shortly.
172 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this
was history, and had nothing to do with education. The private
secretary copied the notes into his private books, and that was all
the share he had in the matter, except to talk in private.
No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were
in a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the af-
fair was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance to
measure the motive forces of men; their qualities of character;
their foresight; their tenacity of purpose.
In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the rams.
Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his efforts
for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the Legation
in September, 1863, the Minister must surely have admitted that
Russell had, from the first, meant to force his plan of interven-
tion on his colleagues. Every separate step since April, 1861, led
to this final coercion. Although Russell's hostile activity of 1862
was still secret and remained secret for some five-and-twenty
years his animus seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal
to stop the rebel armaments. Little by little, Minister Adams
lost hope. With loss of hope came the raising of tone, until at last,
after stripping Russettof every rag of defence and excuse, he closed
by leaving him loaded with connivance in the rebel armaments,
and ended by the famous sentence: "It would be superfluous in
me to point out to your lordship that this is war!"
What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair;
what the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his
education. Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory
paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have
continued thus :
"It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2d. Because
it is the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 173
action. 3d. Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that
'this is war/ but is pointing it out to the world, to complete the
record. "
This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the pri-
vate secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement
with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister an-
nounced that a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as clerk,
the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety,
merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric. The fact
had to be stated in order to make clear the issue. The war was
Russell's war Adams only accepted it.
Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the Legation
on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries that
" instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure
of the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool." The members of the
modest Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had
accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretary
conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed
by superior weight the rebel left on the Mississippi, so Secretary
Seward had struck and crushed the rebel right in England, and he
never felt a doubt as to the nature of the battle. Though Minister
Adams should stay in office till he were ninety, he would never
fight another campaign of life and death like this; and though the
private secretary should covet and attain every office in the gift
of President or people, he would never again find education to
compare with the life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-
half struggle in London, as it had racked and thumb-screwed him
in its shifting phases; ^ut its practical value as e^cation,,tuilied^
on his correctness of judgment in measuring the men and their
forces. He felt respect for Russell as for Paimerston because they
represented traditional England and an English policy, respectable
enough in itself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had
fought and exploited as the chief source of his political fortunes.
As he understood it, Russell had followed this policy steadily, ably,
174 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
even vigorously, and had brought it to the moment of execution.
Then he had met wills stronger than his own, and, after persevering
to the last possible instant, had been beaten. Lord North and
George Canning had a like experience.
This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it
was also the idea of his Government. For once, the volunteer
secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the self-
respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and is propor-
tional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this case the English
campaign seemed to him as creditable to the State Department as
the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more deci-
sive. It was well planned, well prepared, and well executed. He
could never discover a mistake in it. Possibly he was biassed by
personal interest, but his chief reason for trusting his own judg-
ment was that he thought himself to be one of only half a dozen
persons who knew something about it. When others criticised
Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their opinions because
he thought they hardly knew what they were talking about, and
could not be taught without living over again the London life of
1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely strong and
steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russell or Palm-
erston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power, patience and
steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two years and a
half in their plan for breaking up the Union, and had yielded at
last only in the jaws of war. After a long and desperate struggle,
the American Minister had trumped their best card and won the
game.
Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none.
At every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the
more he was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with
growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of
Adams's whole contention, that from the first he meant to break
up the Union. Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort;
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 175
that he had meant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that
he did not know what he meant. Driven from one defence after
another, he pleaded at last, like Gladstone, that he had no defence.
Concealing all he could conceal burying in profound secrecy
his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of 1862 he
affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith. What was worse
for the private secretary, to the total derision and despair of the
lifelong effort for education, as the final result of combined prac-
tice, experience, and theory he proved it.
Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's
death was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in
1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889. Dur-
ing the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872,
his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and
he had been compelled to see England pay more than 3,000,000
penalty for his errors. On the other hand, he brought forward
or his biographer for him evidence tending to prove that he was
not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in spite of appearances,
acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or policy, as far as con-
cerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his nature. Like
Gladstone, he had thought himself right.
In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of admis-
sions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led even his
old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone's;
but this was not enough for the student of diplomacy who had
made a certain theory his law of life, and wanted to hold Russell
up against himself; to show that he had foresight and persistence
of which he was unaware. The effort became hopeless when the
biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that Henry
Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down once
more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could unravel
the skein.
176 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from
Gotha, 17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond Glad-
stone's plea in excuse for his speech in pursuance of the same
effort, that it was "the most singular and palpable error," "the
least excusable," "a mistake of incredible grossness," which passed
defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of the
public for his speech, he attempted no excuse for Lord Russell who
led him into the "incredible grossness" of announcing the For-
eign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence, "singular and palpa-
ble," was not the speech alone, but its cause the policy that in-
spired the speech. "I weakly supposed ... I really, though most
strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness." Whatever
absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell supposed nothing of the
sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most strangely believed" in
any proposition so obviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napo-
leon delude himself with philanthropy. Gladstone, even in his
confession, mixed up policy, speech, motives, and persons, as
though he were trying to confuse chiefly himself.
There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in
1863, as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on
September I that he could not interfere in any way with those ves-
sels, and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration of
war on September 5. A student held that, in this refusal, he was
merely following his policy of September, 1862, and of every step
he had taken since 1861.
The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is con-
vincing. The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the known
opinion of the law-officers that the statute did not apply, and a
jury would not convict. Minister Adams replied that, in this case,
the statute should be amended, or the ships stopped by exercise
of the political power. Bethell rejoined that this would be a viola-
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 177
tion of neutrality; one must preserve the status quo. Tacitly Rus-
sell connived with Laird, and, had he meant to interfere, he was
bound to warn Laird that the defect of the statute would no longer
protect him, but he allowed the builders to go on till the ships
were ready for sea. Then, on September 3, two days before Mr.
Adams's " superfluous" letter, he wrote to Lord Palmerston beg-
ging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen who have contracted
for the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious," he
began, and this he actually wrote in good faith and deep con-
fidence to Lord Palmerston, his chief, calling "the conduct" of
the rebel agents "suspicious" when no one else in Europe or
America felt any suspicion about it, because the whole question
turned not on the rams, but on the technical scope of the For-
eign Enlistment Act, "that I have thought it necessary to
direct that they should be detained," not, of course, under the
statute, but on the ground urged by the American Minister, of
international obligation above the statute. " The Solicitor Gen-
eral has been consulted and concurs in the measure as one of policy
though not of strict law. We shall thus test the law, and, if we
have to pay damages, we have satisfied the opinion which pre-
vails here as well as in America that that kind of neutral hostility
should not be allowed to go on without some attempt to stop it."
For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of Lega-
tion, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after
two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused
Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well earned
by Russell's old attacks on himself, Palmerston met the appeal
with wonderful loyalty. "On consulting the law officers he found
that there was no lawful ground for meddling with the ironclads,"
or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust neither his law
officers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he suggested buying
the ships for the British Navy. As proof of "criminal negligence"
in the past, this suggestion seemed decisive, but Russell, by this
time, was floundering in other troubles of negligence, for he had
178 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
neglected to notify the American Minister. He should have done
so at once, on September 3. Instead he waited till September 4,
and then merely said that the matter was under "serious and
anxious consideration." This note did not reach the Legation till
three o'clock on the afternoon of Septembers after the "su-
perfluous" declaration of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell
had sacrificed the Lairds : had cost his Ministry the price of two
ironclads, besides the Alabama Claims say, in round numbers,
twenty million dollars and had put himself in the position of
appearing to yield only to a threat of war. Finally he wrote to
the Admiralty a letter which, from the American point of view,
would have sounded youthful from an Eton schoolboy:
September 14, 1863.
MY DEAR DUKE:
It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads build-
ing at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the blockade.
They belong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris. If you will offer to buy
them on the part of the Admiralty you will get money's worth if he
accepts your offer; and if he does not, it will be presumptive proof
that they are already bought by the Confederates. I should state
that we have suggested to the Turkish Government to buy them;
but you can easily settle that matter with the Turks. . . .
The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have
been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of dif-
ficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself under
the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless, these
letters upset from top to bottom the results of the private secre-
tary's diplomatic education forty years after he had supposed it
complete. They made a picture different from anything he had
conceived and rendered worthless his whole painful diplomatic
experience.
To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use
in attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 179
he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much
of it as he wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone"
(n, 464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for
curious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that poli-
ticians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to compre-
hend"; and he added, by way of strengthening it: "For my own
part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood,
above one or two"
Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.
Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but
the American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the suf-
ficient result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the
whole.
CHAPTER XII
ECCENTRICITY (1863)
KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end
of political education, but several years of arduous
study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry
Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had
little or no value outside of England. In Paris, such a habit stood
in one's way; in America, it roused all the instincts of native
jealousy. The English mind was one-sided, eccentric, systemati-
cally unsystematic, and logically illogical. The less one knew of
it, the better.
This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to pene-
trate a Boston mind it would, indeed, have been shut out by
instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration rested on an experi-
ence which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to think
conclusive for him. That it should be conclusive for any one
else never occurred to him, since he had no thought of educating
anybody else. For him alone the less English education he
got, the better!
For several years, under the keenest incitement to watchfulness,
he observed the English mind in contact with itself and other
minds. Especially with the American the contact was interest-
ing because the limits and defects of the American mind were one
of the favorite topics of the European. From the old-world point
of view, the American had no mind; he : had an ^ggg^mjc^ think-
ing-machine which could work only on a fixed line. The American
mm J exasperated the European as ja Jbnu^saw might exasperate
a pine forest. The English mind disliked the French mind be-
cause it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but rec-
ognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not
a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and
ECCENTRICITY 1 8 1
ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical,
and direct^
The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most
struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity.
Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it
with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and
for sake of the eccentricity itself.
The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or din-
ner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence
to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and
when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified
by epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as
to become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of Eng-
lish society as well as its chief terror.
The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but Thack-
eray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at all, and
that his pictures of English society were exact and good-natured.
The American, who could not believe it, fell back on Dickens, who,
at all events, had the vice of exaggeration to extravagance, but
Dickens's English audience thought the exaggeration rather in
manner or style, than in types. Mr. Gladstone himself went to
see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed till his face was dis-
torted not because Dundreary was exaggerated, but because
he was ridiculously like the types that Gladstone had seen or
might have seen in any club in Pall Mall. Society swarmed
with exaggerated characters; it contained little else.
Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps
it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston
thought so. The Bostonian called it national character na-
tive vigor robustness honesty courage. He respected and
feared it. British self-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it was,
seemed to hinf a better and nobler thing than the acuteness of
the Yankee or the polish of the Parisian. Perhaps he was right.
1 82 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settle-
ment. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses
himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. What-
ever others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the na-
tional eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to cor-
rect it. The savage satires of Dickens and the gentler ridicule of
Matthew Arnold against the British middle class were but a part of
the rebellion, for the middle class were no worse than their neigh-
bors in the eyes of an American in 1863; they were even a very
little better in the sense that one could appeal to their interests,
while a university man, like Gladstone, stood outside of argument.
From none of them could a young American afford to borrow ideas.
The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by
regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in the
shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him hesitate;
he saw his own national type his father, Weed, Evarts, for
instance deal with the British, and show itself certainly not
the weaker; certainly sometimes the stronger. Biassed though
he were, he could hardly be biassed to such a degree as to mistake
the effects of force on others, and while labor as he might
Earl Russell and his state papers seemed weak to a secretary, he
could not see that they seemed strong to Russell's own followers.
Russell might be dishonest or he might be merely obtuse the
English type might be brutal or might be only stupid but strong,
in either case, it was not, nor did it seem strong to Englishmen.
Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply in-
terested in deciding whether it was always a weakness. Evidently,
on the hustings or in Parliament, among eccentricities, eccentricity
was at home; but in private society the question was not easy to
answer. That English society was infinitely more amusing because
of its eccentricities, no one denied. Barring the atrocious insolence
and brutality which Englishmen and especially Englishwomen
showed to each other very rarely, indeed, to foreigners
English society was much more easy and tolerant than American.
ECCENTRICITY 183
One must expect to be treated with exquisite courtesy this week
and be totally forgotten the next, but this was the way of the
world, and education consisted in learning to turn one's back on
others with the same unconscious indifference that others showed
among themselves. The smart of wounded vanity lasted no long
time with a young man about town who had little vanity to smart,
and who, in his own country, would have found himself in no bet-
ter position. He had nothing to complain of. No one was ever
brutal to him. On the contrary, he was much better treated than
ever he was likely to be in Boston let alone New York or Wash-
ington and if his reception varied inconceivably between ex-
treme courtesy and extreme neglect, it merely proved that he had
become, or was becoming, at home. Not from a sense of personal
griefs or disappointments did he labor over this part of the social
problem, but only because his education was becoming English,
and the further it went, the less it promised.
By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympa-
thized with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally
to rebellion when foreign and it felt particular confidence
in the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes
foreign rebellion of English blood which came nearer ideal
eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Ital-
ians or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the
ranks of rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds
to attach themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the
English leaders on the Northern side were marked eccentrics. Wil-
liam E. Forster was a practical, hard-headed Yorkshireman, whose
chief ideals in politics took shape as working arrangements on an
economical base. Cobden, considering the one-sided conditions of
his life, was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was stronger
in his expressions than either of them, but with all his self-
assertion he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He
did not, like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously
earnest," as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every
184 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
question"; he was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative
of the old Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend in-
consistencies. Monckton Milnes himself was regarded as an ec-
centric, chiefly by those who did not know him, but his fancies
and hobbies were only ideas a little in advance of the time; his
manner was eccentric, but not his mind, as any one could see
who read a page of his poetry. None of them, except Milnes, was
a university man. As a rule, the Legation was troubled very little,
if at all, by indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions among
its English friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical,
well considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all
rebels, and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed
by old Lord Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a
July 4th reception at the Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim
his old credit as "Attorney General to Mr. Madison." The Church
was rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The
universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most
public confidence like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey took infinite pains to be
neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers,
as well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a
vast majority of the English people seemed to follow the profes-
sional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took that di-
rection; Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Powell Buxton, and Glad-
stone, threw their sympathies on the side which they should
naturally have opposed, and did so for no reason except their
eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots and Yorkshiremen were
cautious.
This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first
cause of this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No
one understood why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent
for London at the same time that he made so good a choice as
Mr. Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent
ECCENTRICITY 185
men to send to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason.
Possibly Mason had a certain amount of common sense, but he
seemed to have nothing else, and in London society he counted
merely as one eccentric more. He enjoyed a great opportunity;
he might even have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with all
society at his feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and
made the social path of the American Minister almost impassable;
but Mr. Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his
most valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason
was his greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with
Palmerston; he drove Russell off the field; he swept the board
before Cockburn; he overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a finger
against Mason, who became his bulwark of defence.
Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake.
Neither could have had much knowledge of the world, and both
must have been unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with
Mason, President Davis sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar
to Russia. Some twenty years later, in the shifting search for
the education he never found, Adams became closely intimate at
Washington with Lamar, then Senator from Mississippi, who had
grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable and most amiable
Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in social charm.
In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters, but he was
an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all his South-
ern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps this was
a reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others, on a
futile mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better
in London, in place of Mason. London society would have de-
lighted in him; his stories would have won success; his manners
would have made him loved; his oratory would have swept every
audience; even Monckton Milnes could never have resisted the
temptation of having him to breakfast between Lord Shaftesbury
and the Bishop of Oxford.
1 86 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate manage-
ment or criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject
that amused him was his English allies. At that moment the
early summer of 1863 the rebel party in England were full of
confidence, and felt strong enough to challenge the American
Legation to a show of power. They knew better than the Lega-
tion what they could depend upon : that the law officers and com-
missioners of customs at Liverpool dared not prosecute the iron-
clad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone were ready
to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon would
offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they owned
Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were building their
ships. The political member of the Laird firm was Lindsay,
about whom the whole web of rebel interests clung rams, cruis-
ers, munitions, and Confederate loan; social introductions and
parliamentary tactics. The firm of Laird, with a certain dignity,
claimed to be champion of England's navy; and public opinion,
in the summer of 1863, still inclined towards them.
Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the mana-
gers must have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as their
champion an eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort of Broug-
ham of Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse temper.
Mr. Roebuck had been a tribune of the people, and, like tribunes
of most other peoples, in growing old, had grown fatuous. He was
regarded by the friends of the Union as rather a comical person-
age a favorite subject for Punch to laugh at with a bitter
tongue and a mind enfeebled even more than common by the
political epidemic of egotism. In all England they could have
found no opponent better fitted to give away his own case. No
American man of business would have paid him attention; yet
the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let Roebuck
represent them and take charge of their interests.
ECCENTRICITY 187
With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern
except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Com-
mons on June 30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck's motion
to recognize the Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no
anxiety, having Vicksburg already in its pocket, and Bright and
Forster to say so; but the private secretary went down and was
admitted under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content,
while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and
tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned,
toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary
felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time,
by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him
too, and he knew how it was done. The manner counted for more
than the words. The scene was interesting, but the result was not
in doubt.
All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which,
little by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the House
of Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began with
Lamar' s failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his consequent
detention in Paris waiting instructions. The motion to recognize
the Confederacy was about to be made, and, in prospect of the
debate, Mr. Lindsay collected a party at his villa on the Thames
to bring the rebel agents into relations with Roebuck. Lamar was
sent for, and came. After much conversation of a general sort,
such as is the usual object or resource of the English Sunday, find-
ing himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by way of showing inter-
est, bethought himself of John Bright and asked Roebuck whether
he expected Bright to take part in the debate: "No, sir!" said
Roebuck sententiously; " Bright and I have met before. It was
the old story -the story of the sword-fish and the whale! No,
sir! Mr. Bright will not cross swords with me again!"
Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the
House on the appointed evening, and was placed under the gallery,
1 88 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
on the right, where he listened to Roebuck and followed the debate
with such enjoyment as an experienced debater feels in these con-
tests, until, as he said, he became aware that a man, with a singu-
larly rich voice and imposing manner, had taken the floor, and
was giving Roebuck the most deliberate and tremendous pounding
he ever witnessed, "until at last," concluded Lamar, "it dawned
on my mind that the sword-fish was getting the worst of it."
Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself rather
than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been unpleasantly
common in the experience of the rebel agents. They were sur-
rounded by cranks of the worst English species, who distorted
their natural eccentricities and perverted their judgment. Roe-
buck may have been an extreme case, since he was actually in his
dotage, yet this did not prevent the Lairds from accepting his lead,
or the House from taking him seriously. Extreme eccentricity was
no bar, in England, to extreme confidence; sometimes it seemed
a recommendation; and unless it caused financial loss, it rather
helped popularity.
r The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of Bright's
courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern people
themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing want
of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin .chiefly to such igno-
rance of the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational as
that of the rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the
courage of a prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty nearly
every man in England that could be reached by a blow, and when
he could not reach the individual he struck the class, or when the
class was too small for him, the whole people of England. At
times he had the whole country on his back. He could not act on
the defensive; his mind required attack. Even among friends at
the dinner-table he talked as though he were denouncing them, or
some one else, on a platform; he measured his phrases, built his
ECCENTRICITY 189
sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded his opponents, real
or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at dull heat; his blow
was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.
One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St.
James's Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient
efforts to unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American
platform. The secretary went to the meeting and made a report
which reposes somewhere on file in the State Department to this
day, as harmless as such reports should be; but it contained no men-
tion of what interested young Adams most B right's psychology.
With singular skill and oratorical power, Bright managed at the
outset, in his opening paragraph, to insult or outrage every class
of Englishman commonly considered respectable, and, for fear
of any escaping, he insulted them repeatedly under consecutive
heads. The rhetorical effect was tremendous :
"Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American con-
test," he began in his massive, deliberate tones; "and every morn-
ing with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses the
American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle
for many years past. It has beheld thirty million of men happy
and prosperous, without emperors without king (cheers)
without the surroundings of a court (renewed cheers) without
nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and
virtue without State bishops and State priests, those vendors
of the love that works salvation (cheers) without great armies
and great navies without a great debt and great taxes and
Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if
this great experiment should succeed."
An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have man-
aged, in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than
Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed artifice
and hurt his oratory. The audience cheered furiously, and the
private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind, for he knew
190 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw Bright talk
republican principles before Trades-Unions; but, while he did not,
like Roebuck, see reason to doubt the courage of a man who, after
quarrelling with the Trades-Unions, quarreled with all the world
outside the Trades-Unions, he did feel a doubt whether to class
Bright as eccentric or conventional. Every one called Bright " un-
English/' from Lord Palmerston to William E. Forster; but to an
American he seemed more English than any of his critics. He was
a liberal hater, and what he hated he reviled after the manner of
Milton, but he was afraid of no one. He was almost the only man
in England, or, for that matter, in Europe, who hated Palmerston
and was not afraid of him, or of the press or the pulpit, the clubs
or the bench, that stood behind him. He loathed the whole fabric
of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham aristocracy, and sham social-
ism. He had the British weakness of believing only in himself and
his own conventions. In all this, an American saw, if one may make
the distinction, much racial eccentricity, but little that was per-
sonal. Bright was singularly well poised; but he used singularly
strong language.
Long afterwards, in 1880, Adams happened to be living again in
London for a season, when James Russell Lowell was transferred
there as Minister; and as Adams's relations with Lowell had be-
come closer and more intimate with years, he wanted the new
Minister to know some of his old friends. Bright was then in the
Cabinet, and no longer the most radical member even there, but
he was still a rare figure in society. He came to dinner, along with
Sir Francis Doyle and Sir Robert Cunliffe, and as usual did most
of the talking. As usual also, he talked of the things most on his
mind. Apparently it must have been some reform of the criminal
law which the Judges opposed, that excited him, for at the end of
dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the table in his old
way, and ended with a superb denunciation of the Bench, spoken
in his massive manner, as though every word were a hammer,
smashing what it struck :
ECCENTRICITY 191
"For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the
Bench, condemning to the penalty of death every man, woman,
and child who stole property to the value of five shillings; and,
during all that time, not one Judge ever remonstrated against the
law. We English are a nation of brutes, and ought to be extermi-
nated to the last man."
As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room,
Adams said to Lowell that Bright was very fine. "Yes!" replied
Lowell; "but too violent!"
Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew
his Englishmen better than Lowell did better than England did.
He knew what amount of violence in language was necessary to
drive an idea into a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that
no violence was enough to affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire
peasant. Bright kept his own head cool and clear. He was not
excited; he never betrayed excitement. As for his denunciation
of the English Bench, it was a very old story, not original with
him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a commonplace
generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted by
foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be treated
only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were probably
not very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright said that
the French, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a nation of
brutes and ought to be exterminated, no one would have found
fault; the whole human race, according to the highest authority,
has been exterminated once already for the same reason, and only
tKcTamBow protects them from a repetition of it. What shocked
Lowell was that he' denounced his own people.
Adams felt no moral obligation to defend Judges, who, as far as
he knew, were the only class of society specially adapted to defend
themselves; but he was curious even anxious as a point of
education, to decide for himself whether Bright's language was
violent for its purpose. He thought not. Perhaps Cobden did
better by persuasion, but that was another matter. Of course,
1 92 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
even Englishmen sometimes complained of being so constantly
told that they were brutes and hypocrites, although they were
told little else by their censors, and bore it, on the whole, meekly;
but the fact that it was true in the main troubled the ten-pound
voter much less than it troubled Newman, Gladstone, Ruskin,
Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally disliked by
his victims, but not distrusted. They never doubted what he
would do next, as they did with John Russell, Gladstone, and
Disraeli. He betrayed no one, and he never advanced an opinion
in practical matters which did not prove to be practical.
The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual oppo-
sites of Bright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest and
most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political econ-
omists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers of de
Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were timid
with good reason and timidity, which is high wisdom in phi-
losophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action. Numbers of
these men haunted London society, all tending to free-thinking, but
never venturing much freedom of thought. Like the anti-slavery
doctrinaires of the forties and fifties, they became mute and useless
when slavery struck them in the face. For type of these eccentrics,
literature seems to have chosen Henry Reeve, at least to the extent
of biography. He was a bulky figure in society, always friendly,
good-natured, obliging, and useful; almost as universal as Milnes
and more busy. As editor of the Edinburgh Review he had author-
ity and even power, although the Review and the whole Whig
doctrinaire school had begun as the French say to date;
and of course the literary and artistic sharpshooters of 1867
like Frank Palgrave frothed and foamed at the mere mention
of Reeve's name. Three-fourths of their fury was due only to his
ponderous manner. London society abused its rights of personal
criticism by fixing on every too conspicuous figure some word or
phrase that stuck to it. Every one had heard of Mrs. Grote as
"the origin of the word grotesque." Every one had laughed at
ECCENTRICITY 193
the story of Reeve approaching Mrs. Grote, with his usual some-
what florid manner, asking in his literary dialect how her husband
the historian was: "And how is the learned Grotius?" "Pretty
well, thank you, Puffendorf !" One winced at the word, as though
it were a drawing of Forain.
No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been
charged with want of moral courage. He proved his courage after-
wards by publishing the "Greville Memoirs/' braving the dis-
pleasure of the Queen. Yet the Edinburgh Review and its editor
avoided taking sides except where sides were already fixed. Amer-
icanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh Review;
it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and Reeve
was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of oscillat-
ing reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless hostility of
Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he never could be
sure what preposterous commonplace it might encourage.
The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that
eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should
adopt English thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion
was correct, yet, as usual, the conclusion was wrong. The years
of Palmerston's last Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years
of truce of arrested development. The British system like the
French, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the
British mind shown itself so decousu so unravelled, at sea,
floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities
had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church.
England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to clearing away
only a part of the debris. A young American in 1863 could see lit-
tle or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not
foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England
in its wake, was to vanish in 1870. He was in dead-water, and
the parti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though
he were the ancient mariner., and they saurians of the prime.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
MINISTER ADAMS'S success in stopping the rebel
rams fixed his position once for all in English society.
From that moment he could afford to drop the char-
acter of diplomatist, and assume what, for an American Min-
ister in London, was an exclusive diplomatic advantage, the
character of a kind of American Peer of the Realm. The British
never did things by halves. Once they recognized a man's right
to social privileges, they accepted him as one of themselves. Much
as Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli were accepted as leaders of Her
Majesty's domestic Opposition, Minister Adams had a rank of
his own as a kind of leader of Her Majesty's American Opposi-
tion. Even the Times conceded it. The years of struggle were
over, and Minister Adams rapidly gained a position which would
have caused his father or grandfather to stare with incredulous envy.
This Anglo-American form of diplomacy was chiefly undip-
lomatic, and had the peculiar effect of teaching a habit of
diplomacy useless or mischievous everywhere but in London.
Nowhere else in the world could one expect to figure in a role so
unprofessional. The young man knew no longer what character
he bore. Private secretary in the morning, son in the afternoon,
young man about town in the evening, the only character he never
bore was that of diplomatist, except when he wanted a card to some
great function. His diplomatic education was at an end; he seldom
met a diplomat, and never had business with one; he could be of
no use to them, or they to him; but he drifted inevitably into so-
ciety, and, do what he might, his next education must be one of
English social life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilem-
mas, he reached his twenty-sixth birthday without the power of
earning five dollars in any occupation. His friends in the army
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY 195
were almost as badly off, but even army life ruined a young man
less fatally than London society. Had he been rich, this form of
ruin would have mattered nothing; but the young men of 1865
were none of them rich; all had to earn a living; yet they had
reached high positions of responsibility and power in camps and
Courts, without a dollar of their own and with no tenure of office.
Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously enough,
he failed here also. From the European or English point of view,
he had no social experience, and never got it. Minister Adams
happened on a political interregnum owing to Lord Palmerston's
personal influence from 1860 to 1865; but this political interreg-
num was less marked than the social still-stand during the same
years. The Prince Consort was dead; the Queen had retired; the
Prince of Wales was still a boy. In its best days, Victorian society
had never been " smart." During the forties, under the influence
of Louis Philippe, Courts aflfectcd to be simple, serious and mid-
dle class; and they succeeded. The taste of Louis Philippe was
bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen Victoria. Style
lingered in the background with the powdered footman behind
the yellow chariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style
save what she inherited. Balmoral was a startling revelation of
royal taste. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court
unless it were the way they were worn. One's eyes might be daz-
zled by jewels, but they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared
well dressed, she was either a foreigner or "fast." Fashion was not
fashionable in London until the Americans and the Jews were
let loose. The style of London toilette universal in 1864 was gro-
tesque, like Monckton Milnes on horseback in Rotten Row.
Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the so-
ciety of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other causes,
young Adams never got the full training of such style as still
existed. The embarrassments of his first few seasons socially
196 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ruined him. His own want of experience prevented his asking
introductions to the ladies who ruled society; his want of friends
prevented his knowing who these ladies were; and he had every
reason to expect snubbing if he put himself in evidence. This
sensitiveness was thrown away on English society, where men
and women treated each others' advances much more brutally
than those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private
secretary too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman.
He was not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old
ones, felt awkward in an English house from a certainty that they
were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might
be told so.
If there was in those days a country house in England which
had a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right
to consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady
Margaret Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting
by her side not for his own merits Henry Adams heard her
say to herself in her languid and liberal way, with her rich voice
and musing manner, looking into her tea-cup: "I don't think I
care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken, not so much on his own
account as on hers, the young man could only execute himself as
gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make one small
exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident, that
she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew
that, except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in
fact a foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she should
like him, or any other foreigner, unless it were because she was
bored by natives. She seemed to feel that her indifference needed
a reason to excuse itself in her own eyes, and she showed the sub-
conscious sympathy of the Irish nature which never feels itself
perfectly at home even in England. She, too, was some shadowy
shade un-English.
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY ,197
\ f , --
Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the priv-
ate secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till he found
his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt himself in so-
ciety, and he never knew definitely what was meant as society
by those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a score of so-
cieties which seemed quite independent of each other. The smart-
est was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest
was the sporting world, also unknown to him except through the
talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of
nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented
legal circles where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes
of the bench and bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge ex-
cept when his father took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, where
they found old Lord Campbell, both abusing old Lord Brougham.
The Church and the Bishops formed several societies which no
secretary ever saw except as an interloper. The Army; the Navy;
the Indian Service; the medical and surgical professions; City
people; artists; county families; the Scotch, and indefinite other
subdivisions of society existed, which were as strange to each
other as they were to Adams. At the end of eight or ten seasons in
London society he professed to know less about it, or how to enter
it, than he did when he made his first appearance at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in May, 1861.
Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him.
An American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor
fished nor gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to
think of society at large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred
were useless to him, a greater bore to him than he to them. Thus
the question of getting into or getting out of society which
troubled young foreigners greatly, settled itself after three or four
years of painful speculation. Society had no unity; one wandered
about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to
be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.
198 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the ac-
counts of his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or George
Smalley, and of various ladies who reigned in the seventies, he
inclined to think that he knew very little about it. Certain great
houses and certain great functions of course he attended, like
every one else who could get cards, but even of these the number
was small that kept an interest or helped education. In seven
years he could remember only two that seemed to have any mean-
ing for him, and he never knew what that meaning was. Neither
of the two was official; neither was English in interest; and both
were scandals to the philosopher while they scarcely enlightened
men of the world.
One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire
House if asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the
usual people. The private secretary was standing among the rest,
when Mme. de Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the
Second Empire. How beautiful she may have been, or indeed what
sort of beauty she was, Adams never knew, because the company,
consisting of the most refined and aristocratic society in the world,
instantly formed a lane, and stood in ranks to stare at her, while
those behind mounted on chairs to look over their neighbors' heads;
so that the lady walked through this polite mob, stared completely
out of countenance, and fled the house at once. This was all !
The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's
pictures of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his gray
capote over his red shirt, received all London, and three duchesses
literally worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events, a private
secretary had surely caught the last and highest touch of social
experience; but what it meant what social, moral, or mental
development it pointed out to the searcher of truth was not a
matter to be treated fully by a leader in the Morning Post or even
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY 199
by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de Castiglione and
Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for simple
measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an
ordered social system tending to orderly development in Lon-
don or elsewhere was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or
Victor Hugo, but was beyond any process yet reached by the edu-
cation of Henry Adams, who would probably, even then, have
rejected, as superficial or supernatural, all the views taken by any
of the company who looked on with him at these two interesting
and perplexing sights.
From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his
road through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to
think in these years, 1860-65, that the nicest distinction between
the very best society and the second-best, was their attitude to-
wards royalty. The one regarded royalty as a bore, and avoided
it, or quietly said that the Queen had never been in society. The
same thing might have been said of fully half the peerage. Adams
never knew even the names of half the rest; he never exchanged
ten words with any member of the royal family; he never knew
any one in those years who showed interest in any member of the
royal family, or who would have given five shillings for the opin-
ion of any royal person on any subject; or cared to enter any royal
or noble presence, unless the house was made attractive by as
much social effort as would have been necessary in other countries
where no rank existed. No doubt, as one of a swarm, young
Adams slightly knew various gilded youth who frequented balls
and led such dancing as was most in vogue, but they seemed to
set no value on rank; their anxiety was only to know where to
find the best partners before midnight, and the best supper after
midnight. To the American, as to Arthur Pendennis or Barnes
Newcome, the value of social position and knowledge was evi-
dent enough; he valued it at rather more than it was worth to
200 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
him; but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary with every
street corner; a thing which had shifting standards, and which no
one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and beauties of
his time, with great names and of the utmost fashion, made some
of the poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.
Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every announcement
of a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a formal dinner.
The greatest social event gave not half the pleasure that one could
buy for ten shillings at the opera when Patti sang Cherubino or
Gretchen, and not a fourth of the education. Yet this was not
the opinion of the best judges. Lothrop Motley, who stood among
the very best, said to him early in his apprenticeship that the
London dinner and the English country house were the perfec-
tion of human society. The young man meditated over it, uncertain
of its meaning. Motley could not have thought the dinner itself
perfect, since there was not then outside of a few bankers or
foreigners a good cook or a good table in London, and nine out
of ten of the dinners that Motley ate came from Gunter's, and
all were alike. Every one, especially in young society, complained
bitterly that Englishmen did not know a good dinner when they
ate it, and could - not order one if they were given carte blanche.
Henry Adams was not a judge, and knew no more than they, but
he heard the complaints, and he could not think that Motley
meant to praise the English cuisine.
Equally little could Motley have meant that dinners were good
to look at. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes; nothing less
artistic than the appearance of the company. One's eyes might be
dazzled by family diamonds, but, if an American woman were
present, she was sure to make comments about the way the jewels
were worn. If there was a well-dressed lady at table, she was
either an American or "fast." She attracted as much notice as
though she were on the stage. No one could possibly admire an
English dinner-table.
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY 201
Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were
perfect. The manners of English society were notorious, and the
taste was worse. Without exception every American woman rose
in rebellion against English manners. In fact, the charm of Lon-
don which made most impression on Americans was the violence
of its contrasts; the extreme badness of the worst, making back-
ground for the distinction, refinement, or wit of a few, just as the
extreme beauty of a few superb women was more effective against
the plainness of the crowd. The result was mediaeval, and amus-
ing; sometimes coarse to a degree that might have startled a
roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to a degree
that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic con-
trast was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his mind.
He meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was
thinking of his own tastes.
Probably he meant that, in his favorite houses, the tone was
easy, the talk was good, and the standard of scholarship was high.
Even there he would have been forced to qualify his adjectives.
No German would have admitted that English scholarship was
high, or that it was scholarship at all, or that any wish for scholar-
ship existed in England. Nothing that seemed to smell of the shop
or of the lecture-room was wanted. One might as well have talked
of Kenan's Christ at the table of the Bishop of London, as talk
of German philology at the table of an Oxford don. Society, if a
small literary class could be called society, wanted to be amused
in its old way. Sydney Smith, who had amused, was dead; so was
Macaulay, who instructed if he did not amuse; Thackeray died
at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never felt at home, and seldom ap-
peared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not sprightly; Tennyson
detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by them; Darwin
never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's break-
fasts: Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew
Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward;
202 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A rela-
tively small class, commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost at the
usual London dinner, such society as this was fairly familiar even
to a private secretary, but to the literary American it might well
seem perfection since he could find nothing of the sort in America.
Within the narrow limits of this class, the American Legation was
fairly at home; possibly a score of houses, all liberal, and all lit-
erary, but perfect only in the eyes of a Harvard College historian.
They could teach little worth learning, for their tastes were an-
tiquated and their knowledge was ignorance to the next genera-
tion. What was altogether fatal for future purposes, they were
only English.
A social education in such a medium was bound to be useless in
any other, yet Adams had to learn it to the bottom. The one thing
needful for a private secretary, was that he should not only seem,
but should actually be, at home. He studied carefully, and prac-
tised painfully, what seemed to be the favorite accomplishments of
society. Perhaps his nervousness deceived him; perhaps he took
for an ideal of others what was only his reflected image; but he
conceived that the perfection of human society required that a man
should enter a drawing-room where he was a total stranger, and
place himself on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire, with an air of
expectant benevolence, without curiosity, much as though he had
dropped in at a charity concert, kindly disposed to applaud the
performers and to overlook mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded
in youth, and towards thirty it took a form of modified insolence
and offensive patronage; but about sixty it mellowed into courtesy,
kindliness, and even deference to the young which had extraor-
dinary charm both in women and in men. Unfortunately Adams
could not wait till sixty for education; he had his living to earn; and
the English air of patronage would earn no income for him any-
where else.
After five or six years of constant practice, any one can ac-
quire the habit of going from one strange company to another
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY 203
without thinking much of one's self or of them, as though silently
reflecting that "in a world where we are all insects, no insect is
alien; perhaps they are human in parts"; but the dreamy habit
of mind which comes from solitude in crowds is not fitness for
social success except in London, Everywhere else it is injury. Eng-
land was a social kingdom whose social coinage had no currency
elsewhere.
Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give
nothing until they approached forty years old* Then they be-
come very interesting very charming to the man of fifty.
The young American was not worth the young Englishwoman's
notice, and never received it. Neither understood the other. Only
in the domestic relation, in the country never in society at
large a young American might accidentally make friends with
an Englishwoman of his own age, but it never happened to Henry
Adams. His susceptible nature was left to the mercy of American
girls, which was professional duty rather than education as long
as diplomacy held its own.
Thus he found himself launched on waters where he had never
meant to sail, and floating along a stream which carried him far
from his port. His third season in London society saw the end
of his diplomatic education, and began for him the social life of
a young man who felt at home in England more at home there
than anywhere else. With this feeling, the mere habit of going to
garden-parties, dinners, receptions, and balls had nothing to do.
One might go to scores without a sensation of home. One might
stay in no end of country houses without forgetting that one was a
total stranger and could never be anything else. One might bow
to half the dukes and duchesses in England, and feel only the more
strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod and never
come nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a personal
mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and
one separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another,
and so make, little by little, a group.
2O4 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir
Henry Holland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted
with every American Minister since Edward Everett, and was
a valuable social ally, who had the courage to try to be of use to
everybody, and who, while asking the private secretary to break-
fast one day, was too discreet to betray what he might have
learned about rebel doings at his breakfast-table the day before.
He had been friendly with the Legation, in the teeth of society,
and was still bearing up against the weight of opinion, so that
young Adams could not decline his invitations, although they
obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nine o'clock in the
morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Hol-
land was himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed
about London, and eating Welsh rarebit every night before bed;
he thought that any young man should be pleased to take his
early muffin in Brook Street, and supply a few crumbs of war
news for the daily peckings of eminent patients. Meekly, when
summoned, the private secretary went, and on reaching the front
door, this particular morning, he found there another young man
in the act of rapping the knocker. They entered the breakfast-
room together, where they were introduced to each other, and
Adams learned that the other guest was a Cambridge undergrad-
uate, Charles Milnes Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the
Member for Wenlock; another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from
Thornes near Wakefield. Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire.
By another chance it happened that young Milnes Gaskell
was intimate at Cambridge with William Everett who was also
about to take his degree. A third chance inspired Mr. Evarts with
a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led William Everett to offer
his services as host. Adams acted as courier to Mr. Evarts, and
at the end of May they went down for a few days, when William
Everett did the honors as host with a kindness and attention that
made his cousin sorely conscious of his own social shortcomings.
Cambridge was pretty, and the dons were kind. Mr. Evarts en-
THE PERFECTION OP HUMAN SOCIETY 205
joyed his visit, but this was merely a part of the private secretary's
day's work. What affected his whole life was the intimacy then
begun with Milnes Gaskell and his circle of undergraduate friends,
just about to enter the world.
Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand
people, great and small; jostled against every one, from royal
princes to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions
and private parties; visited every part of the United Kingdom
and was not quite a stranger at the Legations in Paris and Rome;
he knew the societies of certain country houses, and acquired
habits of Sunday-afternoon calls; but all this gave him nothing
to do, and was life wasted. For him nothing whatever could be
gained by escorting American ladies to drawing-rooms or Ameri-
can gentlemen to levees at St. James's Palace, or bowing solemnly
to people with great titles, at Court balls, or even by awkwardly
jostling royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for the Govern-
ment, and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would
ever know enough of their business to thank him for doing what
they did not know how to get properly done by their own servants;
but for Henry Adams not private secretary all the time
taken up by such duties was wasted. On the other hand, his few
personal intimacies concerned him alone, and the chance that
made him almost a Yorkshireman was one that must have started
under the Heptarchy.
More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly
more distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strong-
est of the British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a
different race from the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the
mass and the cultivation of the West Riding. London could
never quite absorb Yorkshire, which, in its turn had no great love
for London and freely showed it. To a certain degree, evident
enough to Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English or was
all England, as they might choose to express it. This must have
206 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
been the reason why young Adams was drawn there rather than
elsewhere. Monckton Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him,
and possibly Milnes was the only man in England with whom
Henry Adams, at that moment, had a chance of calling out such
an un-English effort. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any re-
gion south of the Humber contained a considerable house where
a young American would have been sought as a friend. Eccen-
tricity alone did not account for it. Monckton Milnes was a sin-
gular type, but his distant cousin, James Milnes Gaskell, was
another, quite as marked, in an opposite sense. Milnes never
seemed willing to rest; Milnes Gaskell never seemed willing to
move. In his youth one of a very famous group Arthur Hal-
lam, Tennyson, Manning, Gladstone, Francis Doyle and re-
garded as one of the most promising; an adorer of George Canning;
in Parliament since coming of age; married into the powerful
connection of the Wynns of Wynstay ; rich according to Yorkshire
standards; intimate with his political leaders; he was one of the
numerous Englishmen who refuse office rather than make the ef-
fort of carrying it, and want power only to make it a source of
indolence. He was a voracious reader and an admirable critic;
he had forty years of parliamentary tradition on his memory; he
liked to talk and to listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George
Canning, his dry champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he
belonged to the generation of 1830, a generation which could not
survive the telegraph and railway, and which even Yorkshire could
hardly produce again. To an American he was a character even
more unusual and more fascinating than his distant cousin Lord
Houghton.
Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his
son brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for
she thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than
some Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably
right. The American had the sense to see that she was herself one
of the most intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY 207
sister, Miss Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an
age and a position in society that made their friendship a compli-
ment as well as a pleasure. Their consent and approval settled the
matter. In England, the family is a serious fact; once admitted to
it, one is there for life. London might utterly vanish from one's
horizon, but as long as life lasted, Yorkshire lived for its friends.
In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough
of Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate
that included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old, play-
thing amused Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a charming
specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, had been long left
to decay as a farmhouse. She put it in order, and went there to
spend a part of the autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one of
her first guests, and drove about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin
with her, learning the loveliness of this exquisite country, and
its stores of curious antiquity. It was a new and charming exist-
ence; an experience greatly to be envied ideal repose and rural
Shakespearian peace but a few years of it were likely to com-
plete his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part in life
as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer.
CHAPTER XIV
DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln
in November set the American Minister on so firm a
footing that he could safely regard his own anxieties as
over, and the anxieties of Earl Russell and the Emperor Napoleon
as begun. With a few months more his own term of four years
would come to an end, and even though the questions still under
discussion with England should somewhat prolong his stay, he
might look forward with some confidence to his return home in
1865. His son no longer fretted. The time for going into the
army had passed. If he were to be useful at all, it must be as a
son, and as a son he was treated with the widest indulgence and
trust. He knew that he was doing himself no good by staying in
London, but thus far in life he had done himself no good anywhere,
and reached his twenty-seventh birthday without having ad-
vanced a step, that he could see, beyond his twenty-first. For the
most part, his friends were worse off than he. The war was about
to end and they were to be set adrift in a world they would find
altogether strange.
At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation, six
months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The Lon-
don climate had told on some of the family; the physicians pre-
scribed a winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was
detached as their escort, since this was one of his professional
functions; and he passed six months, gaining an education as
Italian courier, while the Civil War came to its end. As far as other
education went, he got none, but he was amused. Travelling in all
possible luxury, at some one else's expense, with diplomatic privi-
leges and position, was a form of travel hitherto untried. The
Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in winter offered hills
DILETTANTISM 209
to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples near by to visit;
Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the education of
every properly trained private secretary; the journey north by
vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream; the Spliigen
Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing; Paris had
always something to show. The chances of accidental education
were not so great as they had been, since one's field of experience
had grown large; but perhaps a season at Baden Baden in these
later days of its brilliancy offered some chances of instruction,
if it were only the sight of fashionable Europe and America on
the race-course watching the Duke of Hamilton, in the middle,
improving his social advantages by the conversation of Cora
Pearl.
The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that nurs-
ery of murderers and murdered, as though America were also
getting educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as
before. Nothing happened. The travellers changed no plan or
movement. The Minister did not recall them to London. The sea-
son was over before they returned; and when the private secre-
tary sat down again at his desk in Portland Place before a mass of
copy in arrears, he saw before him a world so changed as to be
beyond connection with the past. His identity, if one could call a
bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemecTto remain;
but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was
a spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.
All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and has-
tened to get married and retire into back streets and suburbs until
they could find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going
home "next fall," and when the fall came, he was going home
"next spring," and when the spring came, President Andrew John-
2io THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
son was at loggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep
things unchanged. After the usual manner of public servants
who had acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will,
the members of the Legation in London continued the daily rou-
tine of English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened
to become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with
the young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but
the custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on
a hack, was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared.
Evidently he must set to work; he must get a new education; he
must begin a career of his own.
Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him; for
diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held,
during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a
position at the centre of action, with his hands actually touching
the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna or
Madrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the next
President should do him the honor to turn him out. For once
all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was not possible.
In any ordinary system he would have been called back to
serve in the State Department, but, between the President and
the Senate, service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of
career was more difficult than the education which had proved im-
practicable. Adams saw no road; in fact there was none. All his
friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way
that he could have taken. John Hay passed through London in
order to bury himself in second-rate Legations for years, before he
drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and George Smalley
on the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried Major-
Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed in
the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was forced
into State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with brevet-
brigadier rank, trying to find employment. Scores of others tried
DILETTANTISM 211
experiments more or less unsuccessful. Henry Adams could see
easy ways of making a hundred blunders; he could see no likely
way of making a legitimate success. Such as it was, his so-called
education was wanted nowhere.
One profession alone seemed possible the press. In 1860 he
would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
thousand other young graduates from American colleges who
entered the world every year enjoying the same conviction; but
in 1866 the situation was altered; the possession of money had
become doubly needful for success, and double energy was essen-
tial to get money. America had more than doubled her scale.
Yet the press was still_the last^resource of the educated poor who
~^ wpuIcL&ot be tutors. Any man who was
fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism. The
enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of
nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, in
diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a
newspaper office. The press was an inferior pulpit; an anony-
mous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still
the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a
wrecked education. For the press, then, Henry Adams decided to
fit himself, and since he could not go home to get practical train-
ing, he set to work to do what he could in London.
He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain
number of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so
clearly. Do what he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere
of English methods and thoughts; he could breathe none other.
His mother who should have been a competent judge, since
her success and popularity in England exceeded that of her hus-
band averred that every woman who lived a certain time in
England came to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter
how she struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English
tone of mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hos-
212 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
tile to them than ever. As though to make him more helpless and
wholly distort his life, England grew more and more agreeable and
amusing. Minister Adams became, in 1866, almost a historical
monument in London; he held a position altogether his own. His
old opponents disappeared. Lord Palmerston died in October,
1865; Lord Russell tottered on six months longer, but then van-
ished from power; and in July, 1 866, the conservatives came into
office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to deal with than the
Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret the change.
His personal relations were excellent and his personal weight in-
creased year by year. On that score the private secretary had no
cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it
was enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all he
wanted, and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he felt
much at ease. Of his daily life he had only to reckon so many
breakfasts; so many dinners; so many receptions, balls, theatres,
and country-parties; so many cards to be left; so many Americans
to be escorted the usual routine of every young American in a
Legation; all counting for nothing in sum, because, even if it had
been his official duty which it was not it was mere routine,
a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led to nothing and no-
where except Portland Place and the grave.
The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind
which deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the
London drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with
bits and fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never
meant to go together, and could be arranged in any relation with-
out making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy
might dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky,
but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie dog, has
the right to doubt; least of all, the Englishman, for his tastes are
his being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee
drifts after his flowers, and, in England, every one must drift with
him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the race-course or the
DILETTANTISM 213
moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one or two fol-
lowed some form of science; and a number took to what, for want
of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a cer-
tain taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted that he
had it not, because he could not see what his son thought he saw
in Turner. The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort of aes-
thetic rag-bag of his own, which he
^
never calledjart. So he wolll3"wander~off~on a Sunday to attend
service successively in all the city churches built by Sir Christopher
Wren; or he would disappear from the Legation day" after day 'to
attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his son attended alternate sales
of drawings, engravings, or water-colors. Neither knew enough to
talk much about the other's tastes, but the only difference between
them was a slight difference of direction. The Minister's mind
like his writings showed a correctness of form and line that his
son would have been well pleased had he inherited.
Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most alluring
and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small chance of
escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no beginning, middle,
or end, no origin, no object, and no conceivable result as education.
In London one met no corrective. The only American who came
by, capable of teaching, was William Hunt, who stopped to paint
the portrait of the Minister which now completes the family
series at Harvard College. Hunt talked constantly, and was, or
afterwards became, a famous teacher, but Henry Adams did not
know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had inherited or acquired
a stock of tastes, as young men must, which he was slow to out-
grow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish of Adams's
mind. The portrait finished, he went.
As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine, and
there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du
Bac, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the Palais
Royal, and talk of whatever interested the students of the Beaux
Arts. Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet seized his
214 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
style. Adams caught very little of what lay in his mind, and the
less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad except the
restaurants, while the continuous life in England made French art
seem worst of all. This did not prove that English art, in 1866,
was good; far from it; but it helped to make bric-a-brac of all art,
after the manner of England.
Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English
garden of innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of
the Milnes Gaskells had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few
Americans will ever ask whether any one has described the Pal-
graves, but the family was one of the most describable in all Eng-
land at that day. Old Sir Francis, the father, had been much the
greatest of all the historians of early England, the only one who
was un-English; and the reason of his superiority lay in his name,
which was Cohen, and his mind which was Cohen also, or at least
not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in order to please
his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis Turner,
Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Fran-
cis Turner or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave
unable to work off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled
in the atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic.
His art-criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to
the British artist. His literary taste, condensed into the " Golden
Treasury/' helped Adams to more literary education than he ever
got from any taste of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one
of the minor poets; his hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was
too ferocious to be liked; even Holman Hunt found his temper
humorous; among many rivals, he may perhaps have had a right
to claim the much-disputed rank of being the most unpopular
man in London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for a docile
pupil. Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked
DILETTANTISM 215
to listen. Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for
Palgrave's voice was strident, and nothing could stop him, Lit-
erature, painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his
attacks, which were always intelligent if not always kind, and when
these failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John Richard
Green, who was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose Irish
charm of touch and humor defended him from most assaults, used
to tell with delight of Palgrave' s call on him just after he had
moved into his new Queen Anne house in Kensington Square:
"Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was, 'I've
counted .three anachronisms on your front doorstep/ "
Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded
with emphasis. Woolner' s sculpture showed none of the rough
assertion that Woolner himself showed, when he was not making
supernatural effort to be courteous, but his busts were remarkable,
and his work altogether was, in Palgrave's clamorous opinion, the
best of his day. He took the matter of British art or want of
art seriously, almost ferociously, as a personal grievance and
torture; at times he was rather terrifying in the anarchistic wrath
of his denunciation. As Henry Adams felt no responsibility for
English art, and had no American art to offer for sacrifice, he
listened with enjoyment to language much like Carlyle's, and
accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as a third mem-
ber of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose
tastes lay in the same direction, and whose expression was modi-
fied by clerical propriety. Among these men, one wandered off
into paths of education much too devious and slippery for an
American foot to follow. He would have done better to go on the
race-track, as far as concerned a career.
Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an art-critic,
still less an artist. For some things ignorance is good, and art is
one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had not the trained
eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but he was curious, as
2i6 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
he went on, to find out how much others knew. He took Palgrave 1 s
word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or Michael Angelo,
and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner; but when he
quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer pooh-poohed it,
and declared that it had no weight in the trade. If he went to a
sale of drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or Christie's, an hour
afterwards, he saw these same dealers watching Palgrave or Wool-
ner for a point, and bidding over them. He rarely found two
dealers agree in judgment. He once bought a water-color from
the artist himself, out of his studio, and had it doubted an hour
afterwards by the dealer to whose place he took it for framing.
He was reduced to admit that he could not prove its authenticity;
internal evidence was against it.
One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the Lega-
tion in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to take
Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings was
on show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be that
of Sir Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed
record of a century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably
none but collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some
dozens of these were always on hand, following every sale, and
especially on the lookout for old drawings, which became rarer
every year. Turning rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped
at one containing several small drawings, one marked as Rem-
brandt, one as Rafael; and putting his finger on the Rafael, after
careful examination; "I should buy this/' he said; "it looks to me
like one of those things that sell for five shillings one day, and
fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a bid, and the next
morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold slowly, and
at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he came
back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much
annoyed at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said
he wanted the drawing for himself if he had not in a manner
given it to Adams, the culprit waited for the sale to close, and then
DILETTANTISM 217
asked the clerk for the name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the art-
dealer, near Covent Garden, whom he slightly knew. Going at
once to the shop he waited till young Holloway came in, with
his purchases under his arm, and without attempt at preface,
he said: "You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I
wanted. Do you mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out
the parcel, looked over the drawings, and said that he had bought
the number for the sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought
possibly genuine; taking that out, Adams might have the rest for
the price he paid for the lot twelve shillings.
Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had prob-
ably seen these drawings. Two of them only two had thought
them worth buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose
the Rafael, Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the
purchaser of the Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject,
but thought he might credit himself with education to the value
of twelve shillings, and call the drawing nothing. Such items of
education commonly came higher.
He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the
window, one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed
at the British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the
drawings, and, if you ask him, he will have it taken off the mount."
Adams amused himself for a day or two by searching Rafael's
works for the figure, which he found at last in the Parnasso, the
figure of Horace, of which, as it happened though Adams did
not know it the British Museum owned a much finer drawing.
At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished red-chalk sketch to
Reed whom he found in the Curator's room, with some of the finest
Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on the walls. "Yes!" said
Mr. Reed ; " I noticed this at the sale ; but it 's not Rafael ! " Adams,
feeling himself incompetent to discuss this subject, reported the
result to Palgrave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it.
Also this point lay beyond Adams's competence; but he noted that
2i 8 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Reed was in the employ of the British Museum as Curator of the
best or nearly the best collection in the world, especially of
Rafaels, and that he bought for the Museum. As expert he had
rejected both the Rafael and the Rembrandt at first-sight, and
after his attention was recalled to the Rafael for a further opinion
he rejected it again.
A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr.
Reed took out of his drawer and gave him, saying with what
seemed a little doubt or hesitation: "I should tell you that the
paper shows a water-mark, which I find the same as that of paper
used by Marc Antonio." A little taken back by this method of
studying art, a method which even a poor and ignorant Ameri-
can might use as well as Rafael himself, Adams asked stupidly:
"Then you think it genuine?" "Possibly!" replied Reed; "but
much overdrawn."
Here was expert opinion after a second revise, with help of water-
marks! In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve
shillings as education; but this was not all. Reed continued:
"The lines on the back seem to be writing, which I cannot read,
but if you will take it down to the manuscript-room, they will
read it for you."
Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts
and begged him to read the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes'
study, very obligingly said he could not: "It is scratched with
an artist's crayon, very rapidly, with many unusual abbreviations
and old forms. If any one in Europe can read it, it is the old man
at the table yonder, Libri! Take it to him!"
This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even
judge a manuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he
had nothing to pay, not even twelve shillings, though he thought
these experts worth more, at least for his education. Accordingly
he carried his paper to Libri, a total stranger to him, and asked the
old man, as deferentially as possible, to tell him whether the lines
had any meaning. Had Adams not been an ignorant person he
DILETTANTISM 219
would have known all about Libri, but his ignorance was vast, and
perhaps was for the best. Libri looked at the paper, and then
looked again, and at last bade him sit down and wait. Half an hour
passed before he called Adams back and showed him these lines:
"Or questo credo ben che una elleria
Te offende tanto che te ofFese il core.
Perche sei grande nol sei in tua volia;
Tu vedi e gia non credi il tuo valore;
Passate gia son tutte gelosie;
Tu sei di sasso; non hai piu dolore."
As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's
reading, but he added that the abbreviations were many and
unusual; that the writing was very ancient; and that the word he
read as " elleria " in the first line was not Italian at all.
By this time, one had got too far beyond one's depth to ask
questions. If Libri could not read Italian, very clearly Adams
had better not offer to help him. He took the drawing, thanked
everybody, and having exhausted the experts of the British Mu-
seum, took a cab to Woolner's studio, where he showed the figure
and repeated Reed's opinion. Woolner snorted : " Reed's a fool!"
he said; "he knows nothing about it; there maybe a rotten line
or two, but the drawing's all right."
For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece,
partly for its own interest, but largely for curiosity to see whether
any critic or artist would ever stop to look at it. None ever did,
unless he knew the story. Adams himself never wanted to know
more about it. He refused to seek further light. He never cared
to learn whether the drawing was Rafael's, or whether the verse
were Rafael's, or whether even the water-mark was Rafael's.
The experts some scores of them including the British Museum,
had affirmed that the drawing was worth a certain moiety of
twelve shillings. On that point, also, Adams could offer no opin-
ion, but he was clear that his education had profited by it to that
extent his amusement even more.
22O THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met
the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that
ought to direct him to the next station but never did. There was
no next station. All the art of a thousand or ten thousand
years had brought England to stuif which Palgrave and Woolner
brayed in their mortars; derided, tore in tatters, growled at, and
howled at, and treated in terms beyond literary usage. Whistler
had not yet made his appearance in London, but the others did
quite as well. What result could a student reach from it? Once,
on returning to London, dining with Stopford Brooke, some one
asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy Exhibition
made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it was
rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than
death. Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own
part, Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was
an object to him as a searcher of knowledge neither would
have vogue in America neither would help him to a career.
Both of them led him away from his objects, into an English
dilettante museum of scraps, with nothing but a wall-paper to
unite them in any relation of sequence. Possibly English taste was
one degree more fatal than English scholarship, but even this ques-
tion was open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought
what he was told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or
Rubens; now a water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfin-
ished because it was more likely to be a sketch from nature; and
he bought them not because they went together on the con-
trary, they made rather awkward spots on the wall as they did on
the mind but because he could afford to buy those, and not
others. Ten pounds did not go far to buy a Michael Angelo, but
was a great deal of money to a private secretary. The effect was
spotty, fragmentary, feeble; and the more so because the British
mind was constructed in that way boasted of it, and held it to
be true philosophy as well as sound method.
DILETTANTISM 221
What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English
as wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one
knew it, but perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were
scrappy, and ought to be studied so. Turning from British art to
British literature, one met the same dangers. The historical school
was a playground of traps and pitfalls. Fatally one fell into the
sink of history antiquarianism. For one who nourished a natural
weakness for what was called history, the whole of British litera-
ture in the nineteenth century was antiquarianism or anecdotage,
for no one except Buckle had tried to link it with ideas, and com-
monly Buckle was regarded as having failed. Macaulay was the
English historian. Adams had the greatest admiration for Ma-
caulay, but he felt that any one who should even distantly imitate
Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One might as well imi-
tate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was wrong here, for
the poet and the historian ought to have different methods, and
Macaulay' s method ought to be imitable if it were sound ; yet the
method was more doubtful than the style. He was a dramatist; a
painter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the English mind, method,
genius, or whatever one might call it; but one never could quite
admit that the method which ended in Froude and Kinglake
could be sound for America where passion and poetry were eccen-
tricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met them at din-
ner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the Eng-
lish method was right, and art fragmentary by essence. History,
like everything else, might be a field of scraps, like the refuse about
a Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little natural reluctance
to decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the golden dust-heap of
British refuse; but if one must, one could at least expect a degree
from Oxford and the respect of the Athenaeum Club.
While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy
with his " History of New England." Of all the relics of childhood,
Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the more so
222 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
because he, too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows of anti-
quarianism, and had forgotten the world in his pursuit of the New
England Puritan. Although America seemed becoming more and
more indifferent to the Puritan except as a slightly rococo orna-
ment, he was only the more amusing as a study for the Monk-
barns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as his
clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia in
the Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man, or,
what was much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and the
task of justification was onerous enough to require the occasional
relief of a contrast or scapegoat. When Dr. Palfrey happened on
the picturesque but unpuritanic figure of Captain John Smith,
he felt no call to beautify Smith's picture or to defend his moral
character; he became impartial and penetrating. The famous
story of Pocahontas roused his latent New England scepticism.
He suggested to Adams, who wanted to make a position for him-
self, that an article in the North American Review on Captain John
Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract as much atten-
tion, and probably break as much glass, as any other stone that
could be thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest nothing
better. The task seemed likely to be amusing. So he planted
himself in the British Museum and patiently worked over all the
material he could find, until, at last, . after three or four months
of labor, he got it in shape and sent it to Charles Norton, who
was then editing the North American. Mr. Norton very civilly
and even kindly accepted it. The article appeared in January,
1867.
Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in educa-
tion; something that tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite of per-
sonal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil wars and
diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be actual,
daily, and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at twenty-eight,
still in English society, dragged on one side into English dilet-
tantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most futile; and,
DILETTANTISM 223
on the other, into American antiquarianism, which of all anti-
quarianism he held the most foolish. This was the result of five
years in London. Even then he knew it to be a false start. He had
wholly lost his way. If he were ever to amount to anything, he
must begin a new education, in a new place, with a new purpose.
CHAPTER XV
DARWINISM (1867-1868)
POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened
no outlet for future energy or effort, but a man must do
something, even in Portland Place, when winter is dark
and winter evenings are exceedingly long. At that moment Dar-
win was convulsing society. The geological champion of Darwin
was Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate at the Lega-
tion. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave said of
Tennyson, that the first time he came to town, Adams should be
asked to meet him, but neither of them ever came to town, or
ever cared to meet a young American, and one could not go to
them because they were known to dislike intrusion. The only
Americans who were not allowed to intrude were the half-dozen
in the Legation. Adams was content to read Darwin, especially
his "Origin of Species" and his "Voyage of the Beagle." He was
a Darwinist before the letter; a predestined follower of the tide;
but he was hardly trained to follow Darwin's evidences. Frag-
mentary the British mind might be, but in those days it was
doing a great deal of work in a very un-English way, building up
so many and such vast theories on such narrow foundations as
to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous. The atomic
theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechan-
ical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Dar-
win's Law of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young
man had to take on trust. Neither he nor any one else knew enough
to verify them; in his ignorance of mathematics, he was partic-
ularly helpless ; but this never stood in his way. The ideas were
new and seemed to lead somewhere to some great general-
ization which would finish one's clamor to be educated. That a
beginner should understand them all, or believe them all, no one
DARWINISM 225
could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist be-
cause it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief,
and one must know something in order to contradict even such
triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.
By rights, he should have been also a Marxist, but some narrow-
trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and
he tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best
thing; he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He
was ready to become anything but quiet. As though the world
had not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it up-
set more. He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by
trying to understand them.
He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of
geology; a science which suited idle minds as well, as v though it
were history. Every curate in England dabbled in geology and
hunted for vestiges of Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges
of Natural Selection, and Adams followed him, although he cared
nothing about Selection, unless perhaps for the indirect amuse-
ment of upsetting curates. He felt, like nine men in ten, an instinc-
tive belief in Evolution, but he felt no more concern in Natural
than in unnatural Selection, though he seized with greediness the
new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir Charles Lyell
published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking the
Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new edi-
tion of his " Principles," then the highest text-book of geology;
but here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature. Natural Selection
led back to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity.
This was a vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniform condi-
tions pleased every one except curates and bishops; it was
the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative, practi-
cal, thoroughly Common-Law deity. Such a working system for
the universe suited a young man who had just helped to waste
five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or
226 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people jwfe? objected to
it; the idea was only too seductive in its perfection; it had the
charm of art. Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of
philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to
back into it to reach^God a posteriori rather than start
from it, like ^ir^ozaTIEEe difierence of metliod taught only the
moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road
was good that arrived.
Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged
hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following
always the strongest pull, between one form of unity or central-
ization and another. The proof that one had acted wisely because
of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-
esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to
higher seemed easy. So, one day when Sir Charles came to the
Legation to inquire about getting his "Principles 5 ' properly
noticed in America, young Adams found nothing simpler than
to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles would tell
him what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the universe
before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir Charles's
ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after half an
hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of American
geologists about the principles of their profession. This was get-
ting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.
The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt
by Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on
their account. He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not
them, but himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles
Lyell, asked him to explain for Americans his last edition of the
"Principia," Adams would have jumped at the chance. Unfor-
tunately the mere reading such works for amusement is quite a
different matter from studying them for criticism. Ignorance
must always begin at the beginning. Adams must inevitably
have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason why the
DARWINISM 227
apple fell to the ground. He did not know enough to be satisfied
with the fact. The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what
was Gravitation? and he would have been thrown quite off
his base if Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know.
At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial
Theory or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the
glacial epoch looked like a chasm between him and a uniformita-
rian world. If the glacial period were uniformity, what was catas-
trophe? To him the two or three labored guesses that Sir Charles
suggested or borrowed to explain glaciation were proof of noth-
ing, and were quite unsolid as support for so immense a super-
structure as geological uniformity. If one were at liberty to be
as lax in science as in theology, and to assume unity from the
start, one might better say so, as the Church did, and not invite
attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man,
altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or
Sir Isaac Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views,
which he thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs.
Sir Charles himself seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his here-
sies in vain. At last he resorted to what he thought the bold ex-
periment of inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provoke
correction. "The introduction [by Louis Agassiz] of this new
geological agent seemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles's
argument, obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed
on the earth capable of producing more violent geological changes
than would be possible in our own day." The hint produced no
effect. Sir Charles said not a word; he let the paragraph stand; and
Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian was strict
or lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.
Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the
glacial epoch remained a misty region in the young man's Dar-
winism. Had it been the only one, he would not have fretted about
it; but uniformity often worked queerly and sometimes did not
228 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
work as Natural Selection at all. Finding himself at a loss for some
single figure to illustrate the Law of Natural Selection, Adams
asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of uniformity on record.
Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him that certain forms,
like Terebratula, appeared to be identical from the beginning
to the end of geological time. Since this was altogether too much
uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up the at-
tempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the end
himself. Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his
purpose, he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first verte-
brate. Infinitely to his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him
that the first vertebrate was a very respectable fish, among the
earliest of all fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still
reposing, under Adams's own favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.
By this time, in 1867, Adams had learned to know Shropshire
familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which
he loved best. Like Catherine Olney in "Northanger Abbey,"
he yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-
century Abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior's
House, and both these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions
or without, he never tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wre-
kin, or visited aU the historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and
Stokesay to Boscobel and Uriconium; or followed the Roman road
or scratched in the Abbey ruins, all was amusing and carried a
flavor of its own like that of the Roman Campagna ; but perhaps
he liked best to ramble over the Edge on a summer afternoon and
look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales. The peculiar
flavor of the scenery has something to do with absence of evolution;
it was better marked in Egypt: it was felt wherever time-sequences
became interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As one lay
on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer haze
towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Urico-
nium, nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to
the railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock
DARWINISM 229
and Buildwas were far superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds
of Caractacus or Offa, or the monks of Buildwas, had they ap-
proached where he lay in the grass, would have taken him only for
another and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They would have seen
little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the
steam of a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of time
as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past, measuring
time by FalstafFs Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of
wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of
all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's earliest
ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, accord-
ing to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon,
and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was
called Siluria. Life began and ended there. Behind that horizon
lay only the Cambrian, without vertebrates or any other organ-
ism except a few shell-fish. On the further verge of the Cambrian
rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of organic exist-
ence had been erased.
That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American,
seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate par-
entage as modern as though just caught in the Severn below,
astonished him as much as though he had found Darwin himself.
In the scale of evolution, one vertebrate was as good as another.
For anything he, or any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety-
nine parts of evolution out of a thousand lay behind or below the
Pteraspis. To an American in search of a father, it mattered noth-
thing whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on
fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether another mat-
ter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced de-
scent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals.
This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result.
La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even
in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war,
Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution :
230 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
"Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme,
Que scelerat pour scelerat,
II vaut mieux etre un loup qu'un homme."
It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the problem
of Pteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete proof of
Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis, and
that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate
had been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites
whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child
on the shores of Quincy Bay.
That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of
them should be older than evolution itself seemed to him per-
plexing; nor could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sud-
den back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating
creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell
and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Siluria,
he understood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a
Limulus, which helped nothing. Neither in the Limulus nor in
the Terebratula, nor in the Cestracion Philippi, any more than in
the Pteraspis, could one conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the
choice mattered little. Cousinship had limits but no one knew
enough to fix them. When the vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it dis-
appeared instantly and forever. Neither vertebra nor scale nor print
reappeared, nor any trace of ascent or descent to a lower type.
The vertebrate began in the Ludlow shale, as complete as Adams
himself in some respects more so at the top of the column
of organic evolution : and geology offered no sort of proof that he
had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might, Adams
could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure inference,
precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one found a watch, one_
inferred ^jnaker. He could detect no more evolution in life since
the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the
Abbey. Alljie could prove was change. Coal-power alone asserted
DARWINISM 231
evolution of power and only by violence could be forced to
assert selection of type.
All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir Charles
it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles labored
only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them till
the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams gladly
studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of
the day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could
prove only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not
uniform; and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians
except Darwin Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be
put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a form of reli-
gious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection. Adams wished no
better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but when he came
to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had no Faith;
that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he
should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey from a
perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had
the idea.pf nonej that
most was Motion, and that what attracted Jhis mind was Change,,
Psychology was to" him a new study, and a dark corner of edu-
cation. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the
grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the
grass or whatever there was to nibble in the Silurian king-
dom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far
more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he could
not account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never since the
days of his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants thought
thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their thought
was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the
Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in
the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had
never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to
discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether
232 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
truth was, or was not, tnie._He did not even care that it; should
bej2!Qvecl true, unlessHtKe process were new and amusing. He
svas ^J^arwi^nJoL,^^^
From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
as criminal worse than crime sacrilege ! Society punished
it ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father,
looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not
annoy him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need
to learn from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on
enterprises great or small. He had no notion of letting the cur-
rents of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience. To
him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it
might. He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on main-
taining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity. The
mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking into
every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judi-
ciously pointed out to his wives, Jatal to their practical usefulness
in society. One could not stop to chase dpuhta^as thpugh^tliey
werejrabbrts. One had no time "to paint and putty the surface of
Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young men
whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900,
Law should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the
atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, com-
pulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force himself to follow
wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five thousand millions
more in money, and a million more lives.
As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he
could not foresee that science and society would desert him in
paying it. He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good
faith. The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should
take its place, founded deeply in interest and law. This was the
result of five or six years in England; a result so British as to be
almost the equivalent of an Oxford degree.
DARWINISM 233
Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles
who left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned reso-
lutely to business, and attacked the burning question of specie
payments. His principles assured him that the honest way to re-
sume payments was to restrict currency. He thought he might
win a name among financiers and statesmen at home by showing
how this task had been done by England, after the classical sus-
pension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the study of this per-
plexed period, he waded as well as he could through a morass of
volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his confu-
sion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British finan-
cial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that
the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the
Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were the remedies.
The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was se-
rious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis to his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution
was not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy
forever the last hope of employment in State Street. Six months
of patient labor would be thrown away if he did not publish, and
with it his whole scheme of making himself a position as a prac-
tical man-of-business. If he did publish, how could he tell vir-
tuous bankers in State Street that moral and absolute principles
of abstract truth, such as theirs, had nothing to do with the mat-
ter, and that they had better let it alone? Geologists, naturally
a humble and helpless class, might not revenge impertinences of-
fered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or forgave.
With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-
1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North
American for choice. He knew that two heavy, technical, financial
studies thus thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to
crush the author; but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic
234 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
when successful than his ignorance. The editor accepted
both.
When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with
as much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The
letter gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had
the freedom of the press. These articles, following those on Po-
cahontas and Lyell, enrolled him on the permanent staff of the
North American Review. Precisely what this rank was worth, no
one could say; but, for fifty years the North American Review had
been the stage coach which carried literary Bostonians to such
distinction as they had achieved. Few writers had ideas which
warranted thirty pages of development, but for such as thought
they had, the Review alone offered space. An article was a small
volume which required at least three months' work, and was paid,
at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even in England or
France could write a good thirty-page article, and practically no
one in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in
search of items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea
or a fact, which was a sort of wild game a blue-fish or a teal
worth anywhere from fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaper
writers had their eye on quarterly pickings. The circulation of
the Review had never exceeded three or four hundred copies, and
the Review had never paid its reasonable expenses. Yet it stood
at the head of American literary periodicals; it was a source of
suggestion to cheaper workers; it reached far into societies that
never knew its existence; it was an organ worth playing on; and,
in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in some indistinct future, to
playing on a New York daily newspaper.
With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself what
better he could have done. On the whole, considering his helpless-
ness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No one could
yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play
a part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might
DARWINISM 235
perhaps have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the
Rockefellers or William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one
would have picked out William McKinley or John Hay or Mark
Hanna for great statesmen. Boston was ignorant of the careers
in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry Higginson. Phillips
Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard; Howells was
new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start. Out
of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond
the century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year
1867 could show none that was so far in advance as to warrant
odds in its favor. The army men had for the most part fallen to
the ranks. Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, he
would have been no wiser, and could have chosen no better path.
Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the pleas-
antest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the Silu-
rian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord
Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the back-
ground the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was
moving rapidly, and the conduct of England during the American
Civil War was the last thing that London liked to recall. The
revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and, for the first time
in history, the American felt himself almost as strong as an English-
man. He had thirty years to wait before he should feel himself
stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary could afford to be
happy. His old education was finished; his new one was not be-
gun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end of a very
long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with another to
follow, and a summer sea between.
He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was
back in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season
he wandered on horseback over the campagna or on foot through
the Rome of the middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of
Ara Coeli, as had become with him almost a superstition, like the
waters of the fountain of Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn
236 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
as ever, with its mediaeval society, artistic, literary, and clerical,
taking itself as seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The
long ten years of accidental education had changed nothing for
him there. He knew no more in 1868 than in 1858. He had learned
nothing whatever that made Rome more intelligible to him, or
made life easier to handle. The case was no better when he got
back to London and went through his last season. London had
become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his habits, and
even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like an Englishman,
and going into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a
straw. He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments
of his friends. When at last he found himself back again at Liver-
pool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved mechan-
ically, unstrung, but he had no more acquired education than
when he first trod the steps of the Adelphi Hotel in November,
1858. He could see only one great change, and this was wholly
in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed his imagination; even
the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest; he felt
no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British peerage,
but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who fre-
quented their country houses; he had become. English to the point
of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices
against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of
American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn
suit of clothes. As far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen
meant by social education, but in any case it was all the education
he had gained from seven years in London.
CHAPTER XVI
THE PRESS (1868)
AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the
tropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the
Motley family clambered down the side of their Cunard
steamer into the government tugboat, which set them ashore in
black darkness at the end of some North River pier. Had they
been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000, landing from a galley
fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the
shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years before.
The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist,
started up an unknown street, in company with the private secre-
tary who had become private citizen, in search of carriages to
convey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was
arduous but successful Towards midnight they found shelter
once more in their native land.
How much its character had changed or was changing, they
could not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that
matter, the land itself knew no more than they. _
ica was always trying, almost as blindly as an e^rthwonn, to real-
ize and understand itself; to catch up with its owa.liead, and.lo
twist about in search of its jtajl. Society offered the profile of a
long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the prairies, its
few score of leaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants,
negroes, and Indians far in the rear, somewhere in archaic time.
It enjoyed the vast advantage over Europe that all seemed, for
the moment, to move in one direction, l^He Europe wasted most
of its energy in trying several contradictory movements at once;
but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or oriented
towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead.
Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the
238 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
head of the caravan as jpossible, ^andjjeeded most to knqwjwhere
the leaders could be found.
"One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the
last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies
coal, iron, steam a distinct superiority in power over the old
industrial elements agriculture, handwork, and learning; but
the result of this revolution" on a survivor from the fifties re-
sembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain,
to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail;
he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a be-
lated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world
was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow
not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling
a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs but had a keener
instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he American
of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots
behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made
no complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse
off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their
heritage by his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he
was not himself at fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet
to any superiority of his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out
of the track, and must get back into it as best he could.
One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be
fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at his
father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he. All were
equally survivals from the forties bric-a-brac from the time of
Louis Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments that had been
more or less suited to the colonial architecture, but which never had
much value in Desbrosses Street or Fifth Avenue. They could
scarcely have earned five dollars a day in any modern industry.
The men who commanded high pay were as a rule not ornamental.
Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked social charm.
Doubtless the country needed ornament needed it very badly
THE PRESS 239
indeed bi^^jieeded energy still more, and capital most of all,
for its supply was ridiculously out of proportion to its wants.
On tkejiew scale of power, merely to make the continent habitable
for civilizei^eoplejwould require an immediate outlay that would
&Y?J^^PtiJtKe world. As yet, no portion of the world except
a few narrow stretches of western Europe had ever been tolerably
provided with the essentials of comfort and convenience; to fit
9Ut an entire continent with roads and the decencies of life would
exhaust the credit of the entire planet. Such an estimate seemed
outrageous to a Texan member of Congress who loved the sim-
plicity of nature's noblemen; but the mere suggestion that a sun
existed above him would outrage the self-respect of a deep-sea
fish that carried a lantern on the end of its nose. JFrom the mo-
togk on extravagance.
Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the Des-
brosses Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the effort to
see his own length. The new Americans, of whom he was to be
one, must, whether they were fit or unfit, create a world of their
own, a science, a society, a philosophy, a universe, where they had
not yet creald^a:QM.Ql^YeaJl5amec[tp diig .th_eirjown iron. They
had no time for thought; they saw, and could see, nothing" beyond
their day's work; their attitude to the universe outside them was
that of the deep-sea fish. Above all, they naturally and intensely
disliked to be told what to do, and how to do it, by men who took
their ideas and their methods from the abstract theories of his-
tory, philosophy, or theology. They knew L enough to know that
jtheirjWQild was one of energies quite new. ~~ ""
All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as
little as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he
knew, the less he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and
seemed rather inclined to boast of it, at least on the sturnp; but
the leaders of industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other.
They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at
240 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
hand. They had been obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste
immense energy in settling what had been settled a thousand years
before, and should never have been revived. At prodigious ex-
pense, by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leaving every-
thing but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing else had
a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having cleared
its path so far, society wentjback>,to its work, and threw itself on
that which stood first l its roads, ) The field was vast; altogether
beyond its power to control offhand; and society dropped every
thought of dealing with anything more than the single fraction
called a ^railway system. This relatively small part of its task was
still so big as to need the energies of a generation, for it required
all the new machinery to be created capital, banks, mines,
furnaces, shops, power-houses, technical knowledge, mechanical
population, together with a steady remodelling of social and polit-
ical habits, ideas, and institutions to fit the new scale and suit the
new conditions. The generation between 1865 and 1895 was al-
ready mortgaged to the railways, and no one knew it better than
the generation itself.
Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act
as though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the
new start. His brother Charles had determined to strike for the
railroads; Henry was to strike for the press; and they hoped to
play into each other's hands. They had great need, for they found
no one else to play with. After discovering the worthlessness of a
so-called education, they had still to discover the worthlessness of
so-called social connection. No young man had a larger acquaint-
ance and relationship than Henry Adams, yet he knew no one
who could help him. He was for sale, in the open market. So
were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and knew too that
they were cheap ; to be bought at the price of a mechanic. There was
no concealment, no delicacy, and no illusion about it. Neither he
nor his friends complained; but he felt sometimes a little surprised
that, as far as he knew, no one, seeking in the labor market, ever
THE PRESS 241
so much as inquired about their fitness. The want of solidarity
between old and young seemed American. The young man was
required to impose himself, by the usual business methods, as a
necessity on his elders, in order to compel them to buy him as an
investment. As Adams felt it, he was in a manner expected to
blackmail. Many a young man complained to him in after life
of the same experience, which became a matter of curious reflec-
tion as he grew old. The labor market of good society was ill-
organized.
Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor. A peculiar
and perplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had
changed much in ten years, it was not less perplexing. One no
longer dined at two o'clock; one could no longer skate on Back
Bay; one heard talk of Bostonians worth five millions or more as
something not incredible. Yet the place seemed still simple, and
less restless-minded than ever before. In the line that Adams had
chosen to follow, he needed more than all else the help of the press,
but any shadow of hope on that side vanished instantly. The less
one meddled with the Boston press, the better. All the newspaper-
men were clear on that point. The same was true of politics.
Boston meant business. The Bostonians were building railways.
Adams would have liked to help in building railways, but had no
education. He was not fit.
He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations, renewing
friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years old, the
man who has not yet got further than to study the situation, is lost,
or near it. He could see nothing in the situation that could be of
use to him. His friends had won no more from it than he. His
brother Charles, after three years of civil life, was no better off
than himself, except for being married and in greater need of in-
come. His brother John had become a brilliant political leader on
the wrong side. No one had yet regained the lost ground of the
war.
He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the
242 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had learned
so painfully in London was worse than useless in America where
every standard was different. Newport was charming, but it asked
for no education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer and
pleasanter, and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in that
society were a kind of social partnership, like the classes at college;
not education but the subjects of education. All were doing the
same thing, and asking the same question of the future. None
could help. Society seemed founded on the law that all was for
the best New Yorkers in the best of Newports, and that all young
people were rich if they could waltz. It was a new version of the
Ant and Grasshopper.
At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or
had shown a sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward
Atkinson. Boston was cool towards sons, whether prodigals or
other, and needed much time to make up its mind what to do for
them time which Adams, at thirty years old, could hardly
spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to hire an office
in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze there alone,
vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for Fortune to
knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the elevator;
or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in use. Whether
this course would have offered his best chance he never knew;
it was one of the points in practical education which most needed
a clear understanding, and he could never reach it. His father and
mother would have been glad to see him stay with them and begin
reading Blackstone again, and he showed no very filial tenderness
by abruptly breaking the tie that had lasted so long. After all, per-
haps Beacon Street was as good as any other street for his objects
in life; possibly his easiest and surest path was from Beacon
Street to State Street and back again, all the days of his years.
Who could tell? Even after life was over, the doubt could not be
determined.
THE PRESS . 24.3
In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path that
had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his brothers.
He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his peculiar
birthright. The mere thought of beginning life again in Mount
Vernon Street lowered the pulsations of his heart. This is a
story of education not a mere lesson of life and, with edu-
cation, temperament has in strictness nothing to do, although in
practice they run close together. Neither by temperament nor
by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted far away
and behind his companions there; no one trusted his tempera-
ment or education ; he had to go.
Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his plan
of joining the press, and selected Washington as the shortest road
to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside the social
pale. No Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced one's
self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of deplorably
bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances of ending
in the gutter were, at best, even. The risk was the greater in
Adams's case, because he had no very clear idea what to do when
he got there. That he must educate himself over again, for ob-
jects quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old educations,
was the only certainty; but how he was to do it how he was
to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist of the Cap-
ital he had not an idea, and no one to teach him. The ques-
tion of money is rarely serious for a young American unless he is
married, and money never troubled Adams more than others; not
because he had it, but because he could do without it, like most
people in Washington who all lived on the income of bricklayers;
but with or without money he met the difficulty that, after get-
ting to Washington in order to go on the press, it was necessary
to seek a press to go on. For large work he could count on the
North American Review, but this was scarcely a press. For cur-
rent discussion and correspondence, he could depend on the New
York Nation ; but what he needed was a New York daily, and no
244 ' THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the death
of Henry J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was
out of the question both for political and personal reason
