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 reasons, and
because Whitelaw Reid had already undertaken that singularly
venturesome position, amid difficulties that would have swamped
Adams in four-and-twenty hours. Charles A. Dana had made
the Sun a very successful as well as a very amusing paper, but had
hurt his own social position in doing it; and Adams knew himself
well enough to know that he could never please himself and Dana
too; with the best intentions, he must always fail as a black-
guard, and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life
to the Sun. As for the New York Herald, it was a despotic em-
pire admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the
moment, the New York daily press offered no field except the
free-trade Holy Land of the Evening Post under William Cullen
Bryant, while beside it lay only the elevated plateau of the New
Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation. Much as Adams
liked Godkin, and glad as he was to creep under the shelter of
the Evening Post and the Nation., he was well aware that he should
find there only the same circle of readers that he reached in the
North American Review.
The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washing-
ton, except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then
Attorney-General and living there, he would stand in solitude
much like that of London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in
Boston seemed to care for doing; he held out a hand to the young
man. Whether Boston, like Salem, really shunned strangers, or
whether Evarts was an exception even in New York, he had the
social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by nature, prodi-
gal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born man-of-the-
world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without scruple, and ac-
cepted the world without fearing or abusing it. His wit was the
least part of his social attraction. His talk was broad and free.
He laughed where he could; he joked if a joke was possible; he
THE PRESS 245
was true to his friends, and never lost his temper or became ill-
natured. Like all New Yorkers he was decidedly not a Bostonian;
but he was what one might call a transplanted New Englander,
like General Sherman; a variety, grown in ranker soil. In the
course of life, and in widely different countries, Adams incurred
heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom he had no claim
and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps half-a-dozen
such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is a large number
as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily than when
Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.
Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep grati-
tude, the more because his first struggle with a sleeping-car made
him doubt the value to him of a Pullman civilization ; but
he was even more grateful for the shelter of Mr. Evarts's house
in H Street at the corner of Fourteenth, where he abode in safety
and content till he found rooms in the roomless village. To him
the village seemed unchanged. Had he not known that a great
war and eight years of astonishing movement had passed over it,
he would have noticed nothing that betrayed growth. As of old,
houses were few; rooms fewer; even the men were the same. No
one seemed to miss the usual comforts of civilization, and Adams
was glad to get rid of them, for his best chance lay in the eight-
eenth century.
The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an
aspirant to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately
took him to the White House and presented him to President
Andrew Johnson. The interview was brief and consisted in the
stock remark common to monarchs and valets, that the young
man looked even younger than he was. The younger man felt
even younger than he looked. He never saw the President again,
and never felt a wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson was not the
sort of man whom a young reformer of thirty, with two or three
foreign educations, was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet, musing
246 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
over the interview as a matter of education, long years afterwards,
he could not help recalling the President's figure with a distinct-
ness that surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and
statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem
that had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no
doubt, were greater than others; but all were statesmen and all
were supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of right-
ness. To them the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was
their universe, a Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say
that he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the South-
ern system until he found that slavery could not stand a war.
Slavery was only a part of the Southern system, and the life
of it all the vigor the poetry was its moral certainty of
self. The Southerner could not doubt; and this self-assurance
not only gave Andrew Johnson the look of a true President, but
actually made him one. When Adams came to look back on it
afterwards, he was surprised to realize how strong the Executive
was in 1868 perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Cer-
tainly he never again found himself so well satisfied, or so much
at home.
Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed
little changed in these eight years. He was the same with a
difference. Perhaps he unlike Henry Adams had at last got
an education, and all he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned him-
self to doing without it. Whatever the reason, although his man-
ner was as roughly kind as ever, and his talk as free, he appeared
to have closed his account with the public; he no longer seemed
to care; he asked nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support;
he talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his
discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in these last
days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in the
evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
drew near, wanting to feel that the great man the only chief
THE PRESS 247
he ever served even as a volunteer recognized some personal
relation, he asked Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his
rooms, and play his game of whist there, as he did every night in
his own house. Mr. Seward came and had his whist, and Adams
remembered his rough parting speech: "A very sensible enter-
tainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of Mr. Seward,
and the only one he ever accepted.
Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,
Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what
should have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State Depart-
ment had ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the Treasury
had taken its place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a man
new to politics Hugh McCulloch not a person of much im-
portance in the eyes of practical politicans such as young members
of the press meant themselves to become, but they all liked Mr.
McCulloch, though they thought him a stop-gap rather than a
force. Had they known what sort of forces the Treasury was to
offer them for support in the generation to come, they might have
reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams was
fated to watch the Sittings of many more Secretaries than he ever
cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the idea that
McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to represent
everything that one liked least. He was no politician, he had no
party, and no power. He was not fashionable or decorative. He
was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prej-
udice which the serf feels to his overseer; for he knew he must
obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only their helpless-
ness when they tempered obedience by mockery. The world,
after i86^becane a bankers' world, and no banker would ever
trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to Wash-
ington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at all, for
he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow five thousand
dollars of any bank in America. The banker never would trust
him, and he would never trust the banker. To him, the banking
248 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
mind was obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the more
surprise at finding McCulloch the broadest, most liberal, most
genial, and most practical public man in Washington.
There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
that time was very great. The whole financial system was in
chaos; every part of it required reform; the utmost experience,
tact, and skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No
one knew how well McCulloch did it until his successor took it in
charge, and tried to correct his methods. Adams did not know
enough to appreciate McCulloch's technical skill, but he was
struck at his open and generous treatment of young men. Of all
rare qualities, this was, in Adams's experience, the rarest. As a
rule, officials dread interference. The strongest often resent it
most. Any official who admits equality in discussion of his official
course, feels it to be an act of virtue; after a few months or years
he tires of the effort. Every friend in power is a friend lost. This
rule is so nearly absolute that it may be taken in practice as ad-
mitting no exception. Apparent exceptions exist, and McCulloch
was one of them.
McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and in-
fantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early political
education. He had neither past nor future, and could afford to
be careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded by all the
active and intelligent young men in the country. Full of faith,
greedy for work, eager for reform, energetic, confident, capable,
quick of study, charmed with a fight, equally ready to defend or
attack, they were unselfish, and even as young men went
honest. They came mostly from the army, with the spirit of the
volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank Barlow, Frank Bartlett were
types of the generation. Most of the press, and much of the
public, especially in the West, shared their ideas. No one denied
the need for reform. Th^v^ole^overnmentj from top to bottom,
was rotten, with the senility of what was antiquated_ and ^^.In-
stability of what was improvised. The currency was only one
THE PRESS 249
example; the tariff was another; but the whole fabric required
reconstruction as much as in 1789, for the Constitution had be-
come as antiquated as the Confederation. Sooner or later a shock
must come, the more dangerous the longer postponed. The Civil
War had made a new system in fact; the country would have to
reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.
One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough,
but no one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant,
universal nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests
upheld it. McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with
large good-nature and willing sympathy outside of parties,
jobs, bargains, corporations or intrigues which Adams never
was to meet again.
Chaos often breeds^iife, when order breeds habit- The Civil
War hacfbred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the
volunteer type were not always docile under control, but they
were handy in a fight. Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted
as one of them. He found himself much at home with them
more at home than he ever had been before, or was ever to be
again in the atmosphere of the Treasury. He had no strong
party passion, and he felt as though he and his friends owned this
administration, which, in its dying days, had neither friends nor
future except in them.
These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme
Court was about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge
Curtis had been employed to argue against the constitutional
power of the Government to make an artificial standard of value
in time of peace. Evarts was anxious to fix on a line of argument
that should have a chance of standing up against that of Judge
Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He did not know which foot to
put forward. About to deal with Judge Curtis, the last of the
strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could risk no chances. In
250 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to discuss, and
Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving,
dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.
Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all, more
solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to treat Mr.
Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts himself
expressed for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like most
young men, he was much of a doctrinaire, and the question was,
in any event, rather historical or political than legal. He could
easily maintain, by way of argument, that the required power had
never been given, and that no sound constitutional reason could
possibly exist for authorizing the Government to overthrow the
standard of value without necessity, in time of peace. The dis-
pute itself had not much value for him, even as education, but it
led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice himself. Following
up the subject for his letters to the Nation and his articles in the
North American Review, Adams grew to be intimate with the Chief
Justice, who, as one of the oldest and strongest leaders of the Free
Soil Party, had claims to his personal regard; for the old Free
Soilers were becoming few. Like all strong-willed and self-assert-
ing men, Mr. Chase had the faults of his qualities. He was never
easy to drive in harness, or light in hand. He saw vividly what
was wrong, and did not always allow for what was relatively right.
He loved power as though he were still a Senator. His position
towards Legal Tender was awkward. As Secretary of the Treas-
ury he had been its author; as Chief Justice he became its enemy.
Legal Tender caused no great pleasure or pain in the sum of life
to a newspaper correspondent, but it served as a subject for let-
ters, and the Chief Justice was very willing to win an ally in the
press who would tell his story as he wished it to be read. The
intimacy in Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly, and the alliance was
no small help to the comforts of a struggling newspaper adven-
turer in Washington. No matter what one might think of his
THE PRESS 251
politics or temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high
senatorial rank, if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable
ally.
As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him.
As though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise,
dropped back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams
enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner
was fifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner
ever dreamed of, and he felt a sort of amused curiosity to be
treated once more as a child. At best, the renewal of broken rela-
tions is a nervous matter, and in this case it bristled with thorns,
for Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not been the most
delicate of his ruptured relations, and he was liable to be sensitive
in many ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in con-
stant mind; yet it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a
new study of political humanity. The younger man knew that
the meeting would have to come, and was ready for it, if only as
a newspaper need; but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a dis-
agreeable one, as Adams conceived. He learned something
a piece of practical education worth the effort by watching
Sumner's behavior. He could see that many thoughts mostly
unpleasant were passing through his mind, since he made no
inquiry about any of Adams's family, or allusion to any of his
friends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present.
To him, Adams in Washington should have seemed more or less
of a critic, perhaps a spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer
like scores of others; a politician without party; a writer without
principles; an office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this
was, for his purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and
would be likely to do him all the harm in his power. Adams ac-
cepted it all; expected to be kept at arm's length; admitted that
the reasons were just. He was the more surprised to see that
252 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Sumner invited a renewal of old relations. He found himself
treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked to make
a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La
Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's
study and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were
sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses
of omniscience.
On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his
mind a pathological study. At times he inclined to think that
Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved
educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's
mind had reached^ the_ calm of water which receives and reflects
images without ^absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
TJie images from without, the objects mechanically perceived
by the senses, existed by courtesy until the mental surface was
ruffled, but never became part of the thought. Henry Adams
roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he would
have ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically re-
jected, as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner
was more aggressively egoistic than other Senators Conkling,
for instance but that with him the disease had affected the
whole mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, with other Sena-
tors for the most part, it was still acute.
Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most use-
ful; perhaps quite the most useful of all these great authori-
ties who were the stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the
accumulated capital of a Silurian age. A few months or years
more, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town it-
self, changing but not changed. La Fayette Square was society.
Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's nursery mon-
ument to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found
all one's acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and
THE PRESS 253
national government. Beyond the Square the country began. No
rich or fashionable stranger had yet discovered the town. No
literary or scientific man, no artist, no gentleman without office or
employment, had ever lived there. It was rural, and its society
was primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a
great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps
one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of
world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse
tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met
to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The
State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on
Fourteenth Street while Mr. Mullett was constructing his archi-
tectural infant asylum next the White House. The value of real
estate had not increased since 1800, and the pavements were more
impassable than the mud. All this favored a young man who had
come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he could know
?XQd^b^n^^ .him.
After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered
an easy and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from
the safe shelter of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work
with or against he had to admit that nine-tenths of his ac-
quired education was useless, and the other tenth harmful. He
would have to begin again from the beginning. He must learn to
talk to the Western Congressman, and to hide his own antece-
dents. The task was amusing. He could see nothing to prevent him
from enjoying it, with immoral unconcern for all that had gone
before and for anything that might follow. The lobby offered a
spectacle almost picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were
more entertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew
more of life than all the departments of the Government together,
including the Senate and the Smithsonian. Society had not much
to give, but what it had, it gave with an open hand. For the mo-
254 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ment, politics had ceased to disturb social relations. All parties
were mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water.
The Government resembled Adams himself in the matter of edu-
cation. All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was
worse.
CHAPTER XVII
PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of
low spirits new to the young man's education; due in
part to the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the
Maryland autumn, almost unendurable for its strain on one who
had toned his life down to the November grays and browns of
northern Europe. Life could not go on so beautiful and so sad.
Luckily, no one else felt it or knew it. He bore it as well as he
could, and when he picked himself up, winter had come, and he
was settled in bachelor's quarters, as modest as those of a clerk
in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown,
where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the
Russian Minister Stoeckel long before, had bought or built a new
house. Congress had met. Two or three months remained to the
old administration, but all interest centred in the new one. The
town began to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young
writer was lost. He drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn
his work under cover of the confusion. He never aspired to be-
come a regular reporter; he knew he should fail in trying a career
so ambitious and energetic; but he picked up friends on the press
Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles
all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled together in a tidal
wave of expectation, waiting for General Grant to give orders.
No one seemed to know much about it. Even Senators h^d nothing
to say. One could only make notes and study finance.
In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements
of Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the
amusements proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions,
interests, thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington
was a poor place for education, and of course young diplomats
256 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
avoided or disliked it, but, as a rule, diplomats disliked every
place except Paris, and the world contained only one Paris. They
abused London more violently than Washington; they praised
no post under the sun; and they were merely describing three-
fourths of their stations when they complained that there were no
theatres, no restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no drives, no
splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza. This
was all true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient
and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more
sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young
men Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few,
and greatly in demand. After watching the abject unimportance
of the young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a
young duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make
up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society
he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-
natured, almost genial, in the softness of a Washington spring.
Society went on excellently well without houses, or carriages, or
jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any
sort; and the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could
not stay there a month .without loving the shabby town. Even
the Washington girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor
^ell-educated nor clever, had singular charm, and used it. Ac-
:ording to Mr. Adams the father, this charm dated back as far
is Monroe's administration, to his personal knowledge.
Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial or
lewspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken
: or granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter noth-
ng. Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for
t. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the pro-
ession. Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private
secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who became
i dangerous example of frivolity. The new Attorney-General,
PRESIDENT GRANT 257
. R. Hoar, brought with him from Concord a son, Sam Hoar,
vhose example rivalled that of Storey. Another impenitent was
lamed Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far down in
:he list. He wished he had been higher. He could have spared
i world of superannuated history, science, or politics, to have
eversed better in waltzing.
He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All
were profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children
to education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier
without style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier
than he had ever been before; happier than any one in the harsh
world of strenuousness could dream of. This must be taken as
background for such little education as he gained; but the life
belonged to the eighteenth century, and in no way concerned
education for the twentieth.
In such an atmosphere, one made no great pretence of hard
work. If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it;
and, if it will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus
far, no one had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams
had done or could do; if he worked at all, it was for social considera-
tion, and social pleasure was his pay. For this he was willing to
go on working, as an artist goes on painting when no one buys his
pictures. Artists have done it from the beginning of time, and
will do it after time has expired, since they cannot help themselves,
and they find their return in the pride of their social superiority
as they feel it. Society commonly abets them and encourages their
attitude of contempt. The society of Washington was too simple
and Southern as yet, to feel anarchistic longings, and it never read
or saw what artists produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly
abetted them when it had the chance, and respected itself the more
for the frailty. Adams found even the Government at his service,
and every one willing to answer his questions. He worked, after
a fashion; not very hard, but as much as the Government would
258 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
have required of him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work
defied frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world
ever got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was
he. One must not try to amuse money-lenders or investors, and
this was the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three
months to an article on the finances of the United States, just then
a subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it,
he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous
editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good ;
at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April. Of course it
was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were still
anonymous, and the author remained unknown.
The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made
no claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a
place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow
of Lord Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank
seemed colossal the highest in the literary world as it had
been only five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had
flowed since then, but the position still flattered vanity, though
it brought no other flattery or reward except the regular thirty
pounds of pay fifty dollars a month, measured in time and labor.
The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert
Cecil had invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of
politics which he called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and
the name he thought he had been enough in Lord Robert's
house, in days of his struggle with adversity, to excuse the theft
and began what he meant for a permanent series of annual political
reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a political authority.
With his sources of information, and his social intimacies at
Washington, he could not help saying something that would com-
mand attention. He had the field to himself, and he meant to
give himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the newspapers
liked it or not, they would have to reckon with him; for such a
PRESIDENT GRANT
2 59
power, once established, was more effective than all the speeches
in Congress or reports to the President that could be crammed into
the Government presses.
The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could not
be condensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in
October by another which bore the title of "Civil Service Reform,"
and was really a part of the same review. A good deal of authentic
history slipped into these papers. Whether any one except his
press associates ever read them, he never knew and never greatly
cared. The difference is slight, to the influence of an author,
whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred
thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five
hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870 was near at hand, which
was to mark the close of the literary epoch, when quarterlies gave
way to monthlies ; letter-press to illustration; volumes to pages. The
outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and Robert Louis Steven-
son followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling brought
up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found him-
self fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers
kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or
illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, at longer and
longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within
hearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially
conservative. Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority,
so the quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could
surely say where the real authority, or the real law, lay. Science
did not know. Truths a 'priori held their own against truths
purely relative. According to Lowell, Right was forever on the
Scaffold, Wrong was forever on the Throne; and most people still
thought they believed it. Adams was not the only relic of the
eighteenth century, and he could still depend on a certain num-
ber of listeners mostly respectable, and some rich.
Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off
in that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations
260 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
if this had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a
point where he always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers
out of ten make their errors. One may be more or less certain of
organized forces; one can never be certain of men. He belonged
to the eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his
plans. For the moment, America was more eighteenth century
than himself; it reverted to the stone age,
As education of a certain sort the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see
much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick
of a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the
animal's way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned
over and over again in politics since 1860.
At least four-fifths of the American people Adams among the
rest had united in the election of General Grant to the Presi-
dency, and probably had been more or less affected in their choice
by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Noth-
ing could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a
great soldier, and the soldier always represented order, He might
be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and
commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know
how to administer. Even Washington, who was, in education and
experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to organize a
government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamilton s to organize
his departments. The task of bringing the Government back to
regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to
administration, was not very difficult; iLJ^asjeady to, dp it itself,
with a little encouragement, No doubt the confusion, especially
in the old slave States and in the currency, was considerable, but
the general disposition was good, and every one had echoed the
famous phrase: "Let us have peace."
Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Con-
PRESIDENT GRANT 261
gressman one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the
type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good
intentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great
respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers
had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with
a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Represen-
tatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can't use tact
with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a
stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too little, com-
pared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the
phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congress-
man of 1869 he saw little or nothing of later ones but he
knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If
a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent ques-
tion, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that
ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators
passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised
its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew
Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics
of nervous bucking without apparent reason. Great leaders, like
Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more
grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely
sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their
egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did
permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Elaine, and even
McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome
task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back
to decency.
Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians
would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by
reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood
what the world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with
Grant more serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-
262 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
men were alive with eagerness to support the President against the
Senate. The newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double
personality; and his person feels best satisfied in its double instincts
when writing in one sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-
men, whatever they wrote, felt alike about the Senate. Adams
floated with the stream. He was eager to join in the fight which
he foresaw as sooner or later inevitable. He meant to support the
Executive in attacking the Senate and taking away its two-
thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did he much care how
it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect the revolution
in 1870 than to wait till 1920.
With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded
secret of Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered
at the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five
minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so laugh-
able as to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long list of
Cabinet announcements not much weaker or more futile than that
of Grant, and none of them made him blush, while Grant's nomi-
nations had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed,
not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made another total
misconception of life another inconceivable false start. Yet,
unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and
his intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made
no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's nomi-
nations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incom-
petence. A great soldier might be a baby politician.
Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condi-
tion that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on
May 13, 1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly,
"the incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without
absolutely saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams
had laid out for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no
thought of effectual reform could revive for at least one generation,
PRESIDENT GRANT 263
and he had no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could
he sail next ? He had tried so many, and society had barred them
all ! For the moment, he saw no hope but in following the stream
on which he had launched himself. The new Cabinet, as individ-
uals, were not hostile. Subsequently Grant made changes in the
list which were mostly welcome to a Bostonian or should have
been although fatal to Adams. The name of Hamilton Fish,
as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism and prob-
able deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as
Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious
joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr.
McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction
for any one resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the
name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the Interior, suggested help
and comfort; while that of Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General,
promised friendship. On the whole, the personal outlook, merely
for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful, and the political
outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant himself. No one
doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform; that his
aim had been to place his administration above politics; and until
he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to
support him. One's little lantern must therefore be turned on
Grant. One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so
little.
By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite
of rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table,
the two men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was
exceedingly social, though not in appearance imposing. He was
stout; his face was red, and his habits were regularly irregular;
but he was very intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and an ex-
cellent military historian. His life of Grant was no ordinary book.
Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of Grant, as
suited an officer who had been on the General's staff. As a rule,
the newspaper correspondents in Washington were unfriendly,
264 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard tales that made
one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army officers were
no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow, dull, and
vindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a consulate
which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey for
encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious.
He talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feel-
ing for analysis of character, as a true literary critic would nat-
urally do. Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who
acted as his patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that
was offensive about either, but he held that no one except himself
and Rawlins understood the General. To him, Grant appeared
as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but
passive and plastic in repose. He said that neither he nor the rest
of the staff knew why Grant succeeded ; they believed in him be-
cause of his success. For stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid.
Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas into
it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves,
in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his
own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give
the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his
nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when
he would act. They could never follow a mental process in his
thought. They were not sure that he did think.
In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act
on the General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a
legation, his portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and
it amused him to add an authentic likeness of the greatest gen-
eral the world had seen since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was
rather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles
Nordhoff.
Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and in-
troduced him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last,
PRESIDENT GRANT 265
he saw a dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most
famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant
the most curious object of study among them all. About no one
did opinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion
to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his
own good, the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life
he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or unin-
tellectual type Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him
a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted
for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-in-
tellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-
dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man.
In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were
the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang
from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of
others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in
outward appearance; always needing stimulants, -but for whom
action was the highest stimulant the instinct of fight. Such
men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis,
but they made short work of scholars. They had commanded
thousands of such and saw no more in them than in others. The
fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at once.
Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to
follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one
must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympa-
thetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall
Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same in-
tellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression:
"Let us have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad law is to
execute it"; or a score of such reversible sentences generally to
be gauged by their sententiousness ; but sometimes he made one
doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a partic-
266 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it
were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have taken
rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of
simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intel-
lectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree,
but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the American.
What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual,
his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the
Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to
exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The iclea that, as
society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made
of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander
the Great and Julius Csesar, a man like Grant should be called
and should actually and truly be the highest product of the
most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must
be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain
such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President
Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to
upset Darwin.
Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory
was worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams
because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant
because he was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn
skins. Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting
to the stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd
than that of evolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing.
One could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future.
It was not even sensibly American. Not an official in it, except
perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in Sep-
tember, suggested an American idea.
Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish
was almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values;
he was human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt
PRESIDENT GRANT 267
no prejudice whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or
person to attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable;
he was not in the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he
won confidence from the start and remained a friend to the finish.
As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one felt rather happily suited, and
one was still better off in the Interior Department with J. D.
Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the Treasury and Boutwell in
the Interior, one would have been quite satisfied as far as personal
relations went, while, in the Attorney-General's Office, Judge
Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both personal and polit-
ical.
The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole
government been filled with them, it would have helped little
without the President and the Treasury. Grant avowed from the
start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles.
At thirty, one has no interest in becoming a barnacle, but even in
that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen. His friends
were reformers, critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he was
himself an object of suspicion. Grant had no objects, wanted no
help, wished for no champions. The Executive asked only to be
let alone. This was his meaning when he said: "Let us have
peace!"
No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to
support. He knew well enough the rules of self : interest. He was
for sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively cheap,
for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Gov-
ernment, but on New York. All he wanted was something to sup-
port; something that would let itself be supported. Luck went
dead against him. For once, he was fifty years in advance of his
time.
CHAPTER XVIII
FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal,
but the young New Englander was sometimes human.
Judge Hoar brought his son Sam to Washington, and Sam
Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the charm of Wash-
ington spring. Education for education, none ever compared with
the delight of this. The Potomac and its tributaries squandered
beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here
and there a negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the
judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut
gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full
outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its
bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool
charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June
thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual,
animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same
intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that
marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it
were Greek and half human. He could not leave it, but loitered
on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer vil-
lage about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance
could not be questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to ques-
tion them.
In spite of the fatal deception or undeception about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington
had so much amused him that he had not a thought of change.
He loved it too much to question its value. What did he know
about its value, or what did any one know? His father knew
more about it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused
to find that his father, whose recollections went back to 1820,
FREE FIGHT 269
betrayed for Washington much the same sentimental weakness,
and described the society about President Monroe much as his
son felt the society about President Johnson. He feared its effect
on young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two
of his brothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that
a life in Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it.
Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He
saw Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in
every tree. Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King
used to amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that
nature had made in attaining perfection. Except for two mistakes,
the earth would have been a success. One of these errors was the
indmztiQn of the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of
the _sexes, and the saddest thought about the last was that it
should have been so modern. Adams, in his splenetic temper,
held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked their worst
on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and sex was
a species of crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery
till life was as thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in the wrong.
The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a story of
education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his
time. Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, ex-
cept in Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object.
Every one complained of surroundings, except where, as at Wash-
ington, there were no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept
its head better than its neighbors did, and very little time was
needed to prove it, even to Adams's confusion.
Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half
over, and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's
character showed themselves. They were startling astounding
terrifying. The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical
attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in September, 1869, has
never been cleared up at least so far as to make it intelligible
to Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into
270 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
the belief that he could safely corner gold without interference
from the Government. He took a number of precautions, which
he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also testi-
fied, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have satis-
fied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any criminal
lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously,
that no such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead
that he had taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances
which did satisfy him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.
This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound
to start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances
from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could
have satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at
Quincy for want of some one to hire their services at three dollars
a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and
Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much
voracity as Jay Gould, or his time damnee Jim Fisk, had ever
shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences. They
risked something; no one could say what; but the people about
the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.
The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most
efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work with.
Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold
Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up. The sur-
face was in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and they
paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-
House Palace; but the New York side of the story helped Henry
little. He needed to penetrate the political mystery, and for this
purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At first he feared
that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the Congressional
Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew all that
was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by the
Government.
FREE FIGHT 271
Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mys-
tery, and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making
sure that any mystery existed. All Adams's great friends
Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings were
precisely the persons most mystified. They knew less than Adams
did; they sought information, and frankly admitted that their
relations with the White House and the Treasury were not con-
fidential. No one volunteered advice. No one offered suggestion.
One got no light, even from the press, although press agents ex-
pressed in private the most damning convictions with their usual
cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a quan-
tity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.
Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and
could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the
point where any member of the Administration became visible.
Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself feared find-
ing out too much. He found out too much already, when he saw
in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching
his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and that Boutwell's
incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation. With the
conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public as-
sured every one else that the President himself was the savior of
the situation, and in private assured each other that if the Presi-
dent had not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the
next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this
was wildly exciting to Adams. That Grant should have fallen,
within six months, into such a morass or should have let
Boutwell drop him into it rendered the outlook for the next
four years probably eight possibly twelve mysterious, or
frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his wagon, as
Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country might
outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth cen-
tury were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched
272 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and
people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool
of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young
man, fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had ex-
pected to enter an honorable career in the press as the champion
and confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a life
of wasted energy, sweeping the stables of American society clean
of the endless corruption which his second Washington was quite
certain to breed.
By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an As-
sistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar
Wall Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view,
Grant had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been mis-
led by Grant. One could hardly doubt that both of them were
astonished and disgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould
nor any other astute American mind still less the complex
Jew could ever have accustomed itself to the incredible and
inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and perhaps, on the
whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if victims they both
were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap which might
easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States Sen-
ate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confu-
sion, cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scanda-
lous in a- boarding-school of girls. For satirists or comedians, the
study was rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with
happy results, but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity
of London noticed with horror that the grossest satires on the
American Senator and politician never failed to excite the laughter
and applause of every audience. Rich and poor joined in throw-
ing contempt on their own representatives. Society laughed a
vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure. Nothing
FREE FIGHT 273
remained for a young man without position or power except to
laugh too.
Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can
afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice;
it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always
laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and brief
time to seize it. Any one in power above him can extinguish the
chance. He is horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards. One
dull administration can rapidly drive out every active subordi-
nate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every intelligent man about th
Government prepared to go. The people would have liked to go
too, for they stood .helpless before the chaos ; some laughed and
some raved; all were disgusted ; but they had to content themselves
By turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on
their railroads and foundries. They were strong enough to carry
even their politics. Only the helpless remained stranded in Wash-
ington.
The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed
how he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury
every one who could interfere with his repose, and then locking
himself up in it, alone. What he did there, no one knew. His col-
leagues asked him in vain. Not a word could they get from him,
either in the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or information on
matters even of vital interest. The Treasury as an active influence
ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society
to drag his department out of the mire, as it was sure to do if he
waited long enough.
Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to re-
ceive none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments
left to serve. He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition
was his horror; pure waste of energy; a union with Northern
Democrats and Southern rebels who never had much in common
274 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
with any Adams, and had never shown any warm interest about
them except to drive them from public life. If Mr. Boutwell
turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or contempt
that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State
Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness
as any newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could
cling to this last plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the
recognized champion of Mr. Fish in the New York press. He
never once thought of his disaster between Seward and Sumner
in 1861. Such an accident could not occur again. Fish and Sum-
ner were inseparable, and their policy was sure to be safe enough
for support. No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught
a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both
his friends.
This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he
approved; he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley,
and he was delighted; but when he renewed his relations with
Sumner in the winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp the
idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he pro-
posed also to force on the Department. This was not all. Secre-
tary Fish seemed to have vanished. Besides the Department of
State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum
on Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign
Relations over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at
the Capitol; and, finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign
Office in the War Department, with President Grant himself
for chief, pressing a policy of extension in the West Indies which
no Northeastern man ever approved. For his life, Adams could
not learn where to place himself among all these forces. Offi-
cially he would have followed the responsible Secretary of State,
but he could not find the Secretary. Fish seemed to be friendly
towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant, but he asserted as
yet no policy of his own. As for Grant's policy, Adams never had
FREE FIGHT 275
a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he did know,
he was ready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came only
when he heard Sumner's views, which, as he had reason to know,
were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.
Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed.
To his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his
veto on all extension within the tropics; which cost the island
of St. Thomas to the United States, besides the Bay of Samana
as an alternative, and ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened
with incredulous stupor while Sumner unfolded his plan for con-
centrating and pressing every possible American claim against
England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the
United States.
Adams did not then know in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him what was going on behind the doors
of the White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft
Davis knew much more than he. The game of cross-purposes
was as impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy.
President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported,
Adams could not be expected to divine. One point alone seemed
clear to a man no longer so very young who had lately come
from a seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as
much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened
with the more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened
the gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object,
and Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and
Adams was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could
obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Ala-
bama Claims, he drivelled. On the point of fact, Adams was as
peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only
wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr.
Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaint-
ance.
276 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sum-
ner so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quar-
rel with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had
profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy.
Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or
intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-
weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he
knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party,
if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party
manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very
names were unknown to him.
Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then
it was not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcert-
ing than the complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards
told Adams, with the rather grim humor he sometimes indulged
in, that Grant took a dislike to Motley because he parted his hair
in the middle. Adams repeated the story to Godkin, who made
much play with it in the Nation^ till it was denied. Adams saw
no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as good a right to
dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a part of it.
Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less
material than hair on clothes, for example, according to Mr.
Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz and nine
men in ten could hardly give as good a reason as hair for their
likes or dislikes. In truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because
they had nothing in common; and for the same reason he disliked
Sumner. For the same reason he would be sure to dislike Adams
if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish could not be quite sure
of Grant, except for the powerful effect which wealth had, or
appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.
The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but
another quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish
FREE FIGHT 277
and Sumner, worried him even more. Of all members of the Cab-
inet, the one whom he had most personal interest in cultivating
was Attorney-General Hoar. The Legal Tender decision, which
had been the first stumbling-block to Adams at Washington,
grew in interest till it threatened to become something more seri-
ous than a block; it fell on one's head like a plaster ceiling, and
could not be escaped. The impending battle between Fish and
Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between
Hoar and Chief Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington
hoping to support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the
Senate, but he never dreamed that he would be required to help
in breaking down the Supreme Court. Although, step by step,
he had been driven, like the rest of the world, to admit that
American society had outgrown most of its institutions, he still
clung to the Supreme Court, much as a churchman clings to his
bishops, because they are his only symbol of unity; his last rag of
Right. Between the Executive and the Legislature, citizens could
have no Rights; they were at the mercy of Power. They had
created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power, and it
was little enough protection at best. Adams wanted to save the
independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not
conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.
Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review
an article on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a
volume just then published by Spaulding, the putative father of
the legal-tender clause in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who
alone sympathized with reform, saved from BoutwelFs decree of
banishment such reformers as he could find place for, and he saved
Walker for a time by giving him the Census of 1870. Walker was
obliged to abandon his article for the North American in order
to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his notes, and
Adams completed the article.
He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restric-
278 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
tion. He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the
banks and bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough
for a newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted
"intrinsic" value, gold and silver came equally welcome to a
writer who was paid half the wages of an ordinary mechanic.
He had no notion of attacking or defending Legal Tender; his
object was to defend the Chief Justice and the Court. Walker
argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the necessity
for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time the Act
was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections,
Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number
of the North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never
cared to abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of
the army and the Springfield Republican^ and his energy ran away
with Adams's restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained
loudly of this treatment, not without justice, but the article itself
had serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred
of Spaulding's contention that legal tender was necessary at the
time; and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with convic-
tion. The Chief Justice seemed to be pleased. The Attorney-
General, pleased or not, made no sign. The article had enough
historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of
Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not
its point in education. The point was that, in spite of the best
intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to
escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into opposition.
Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.
Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry
Adams went on, drifting further and further from the Adminis-
tration. He did this in common with all the world, including
Hoar himself. Scarcely a newspaper in the country kept discipline.
The New York Tribune was one of the most criminal. Dissolution
of ties in every direction marked the dissolution of temper, and
the Senate Chamber became again a scene of irritated egotism
FREE FIGHT 279
that passed ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each other, and no
one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the Executive
and threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.
That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great posi-
tion who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his
success at Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax
rule, must have had some meaning for Adams's education, if
Adams could only have understood what it was. He studied, but
failed. Sympathy with him was not their weakness. Directly,
in the form of help, he knew he could hope as little from them as
from Boutwell. So far from inviting attachment they, like other
New Englanders, blushed to own a friend. Not one of the whole
delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to help Adams or any
other young man who did not beg for it, although they would
always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics was
the earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to
learn from its study; but the situation struck him as curious
so curious that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four
most powerful friends had matched themselves, two and two, and
were fighting in pairs to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with
foreign affairs and the judiciary as prizes! What value had the
fight in education ?
Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander.
The stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe
Conkling or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value?
The statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or
Hoars or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could
produce. They trod with lofty contempt on other people's jobs,
especially when there was good in them. Yet the public thought
that Sumner and Conkling cost the country a hundred times more
than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old
Southern statesmen, who were also honest in money-matters, cost
280 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt worried Adams
less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected the
whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers discussed
little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield, and
Elaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs,
and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influ-
ence by their insistence on points of morals. Society hesitated,
wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacri-
ficing the weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite
of all such criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and
Elaine for the Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not
seeming to care for the question; until young men were forced to
see that either some new standard must be created, or none could
be upheld. The moral law had expired like the Constitution.
Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well
spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency.
What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would
work, and men who could work it; but it found neither. Adams
had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. His friends
had been driven out of Washington or had taken to fisticuffs.
He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the future.
The result was a review of the Session for the July North Ameri-
can into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought
he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good
history then, and he thought it better twenty years afterwards;
he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it happened, in
the process of his devious education, this "Session" of 1869-70
proved to be his last study in current politics, and his last dying
testament as a humble member of the press. As such, he stood by
it. He could have said no more, had he gone on reviewing every
session in the rest of the century. The political dilemma was
as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970. The system of 1789
had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of
FREE FIGHT 281
a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given it up.
Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's
political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece
out to patch or, in vulgar language, to tinker the political
machine as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of
system, might last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolu-
tion or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the
poorest in the world the clumsiest the most inefficient.
Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling
or even Mr. Sumner he could not honestly say that such an
education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable
heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing
on lower levels clever and amusing men like Garfield and
Elaine who took no little pleasure in making fun of the sena-
torial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself
which the North American Review would not have admitted. One
asked doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their
turn. What kind of political ambition was to result from this
destructive political education?
Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the attain-
ment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it. If
moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working,
new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An
eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay
Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans
laughed, and went their way. Society paid them to be practical.
Whenever society cared to pay Adams, he too would be practical,
take his pay, and hold his tongue; but meanwhile he was driven
to associate with Democratic Congressmen and educate them.
He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of revenue
reform, and turned his rooms into a college. The Administration
drove him, and thousands of other young men, into active enmity,
282 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
not only to Grant, but to the system or want of system, which
took possession of the President. Every hope or thought which
had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the
blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.
All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so
busy, so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew
Congressmen by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He
wrote for his various organs all sorts of attacks and defences.
He enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself as happy as
Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much happier than his friends Fish
or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or Attorney-General Hoar
or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to the woods,
which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de
Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms more
voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the
judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams
astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent
to the Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught
glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage. At such moments
he pondered on the distant beauty of St. Peter's and the steps
of Ara Cceli.
Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to London
for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspir-
acy," which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh
Review. It was the best piece of work he had done, but this was
not his reason for publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had
provoked a sort of revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well
as among some who were not so respectable; and the attack on
Erie was beginning to promise success. London was a sensitive
spot for the Erie management, and it was thought well to strike
them there, where they were socially and financially exposed.
The tactics suited him in another way, for any expression about
FREE FIGHT 283
America in an English review attracted ten times the attention
in America that the same article would attract in the North
American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles
in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright; his high-
est ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since,
in any case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase,
he was becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.
CHAPTER XIX
CHAOS (1870)
ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St.
James's Street wondering more than ever at the marvels
of life. Nine years had passed since the historic entrance
of May, 1861. Outwardly London was the same. Outwardly
Europe showed no great change. Palmerston and Russell were for-
gotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much alive. One's
friends were more than ever prominent. John Bright was in the
Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about to enter it; reform ran riot.
Never had the sun of progress shone so fair. Evolution from lower
to higher raged like an epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of proph-
ets in the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had over-
thrown the Irish Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords;
was trying to pass an Education Act. Improvement, prosperity,
power, were leaping and bounding over every country road.
Even America, with her Erie scandals and Alabama Claims, hardly
made a discordant note.
At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was for-
gotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no one
cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The smart
set had come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had
frequented, from 1861 to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870.
Death had ravaged one's circle of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell
and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were both dead, and Mr.
James Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament. That field
of education seemed closed too.
One found one's self in a singular frame of mind more eight-
eenth-century than ever almost rococo and unable to catch
anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to
educate. London taught less freely than of old. That one bad
CHAOS 285
style was leading to another that the older men were more
amusing than the younger that Lord Hough ton's breakfast-
table showed gaps hard to fill that there were fewer men one
wanted to meet these, and a hundred more such remarks, helped
little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity. For English
reforms, Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed
to him a guaranty against all education he had use for. He re-
sented change. He would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and
the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments. He did
not care to Americanize Europe. The Bastille or the Ghetto was
a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if preserved ; and so was
a Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was the great con-
servative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came back
to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or re-
form. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.
Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would
have cast off his old skin, and made his court to Maryborough
House, in partnership with the American woman and the Jew
banker. Common-sense dictated it; but Adams and his friends were
unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom some innate
atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action,
and rather far up towards the front, he had no idea of making
a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw nothing
ahead of him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to
talk with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked
on the Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him
and his father long before they had been discussed by Govern-
ment; he wanted to make notes for his next year's articles; but he
had not a thought that, within three months, his world was to
be upset, and he under it. Frank Palgrave came one day, more
contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical than ever, because
Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with Germany. Pal-
286 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
grave said that " Germany would beat France into scraps" if there
was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Pal-
grave was always extreme; his language was incautious violent!
In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education. Things
began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of
familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight the
coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Ox-
ford Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as
it did to the returned American. The country never smiled its vel-
vet smile of trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky
as to be asked on a country visit. He loved it all everything
had always loved it! He felt almost attached to the Royal Ex-
change. He thought he owned the St. James's Club. He patronized
the Legation.
The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams
had become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies,
and that his writing would be printed of course; but he was stunned
by the reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen
libel suits on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as
great in England as in America, but one was hardly prepared to
find it controlling the Quarterlies. The English press professed to
be shocked in 1870 by the Erie scandal, as it had professed in
1860 to be shocked by the scandal of slavery, but when invited
to support those who were trying to abate these scandals, the
English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's refusal seemed
portentous. He and his brother and the North American Review
were running greater risks every day, and no one thought of fear.
That a notorious story, taken bodily from an official document,
should scare the Edinburgh Review into silence for fear of Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's experience of English eccen-
tricity, though it was large.
CHAOS 287
He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript
on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it.
The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to
suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an
active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but
to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English
character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to under-
stand it. As usual, when an ally was needed, the American was
driven into the arms of the radicals. Respectability, everywhere
and always, turned its back the moment one asked to do it a
favor. Called suddenly away from England, he despatched the
article, at the last moment, to the Westminster Review and heard
no more about it for nearly six months.
He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram
from his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his
sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he had
better come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni di
Lucca on the second day. Tetanus had already set in.
The last lesson the sum and term of education began
then. He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experi-
ence without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had
never seen Nature only her surface the sugar-coating that
she shows to youth. Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh bru-
tality of chance, the terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth
for life, until repetition made it more than the will could struggle
with; more than he could call on himself to bear. He found his
sister, a woman of forty, as gay and brilliant in the terrors of
lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed
in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that had bruised her
foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained
bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in con-
vulsions.
One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen
288 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of
religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil
the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at
will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took
features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous sur-
roundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added
to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim
with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot
Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the
picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed burst-
ing with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the
Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced
the soft shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the
Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the
sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women
mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconscious-
ness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle.
For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature
had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual
pleasure.
Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that
feels them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought
of a different power and a different person. The first serious con-
sciousness of Nature's gesture her attitude towards life took
form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the
first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human
mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless
energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and
destroying what these same energies had created and labored
from eternity to perfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of
pantomime with a mechanical motion; and its so-called thought
merged in the mere sense of life, and pleasure in the sense. The usual
CHAOS 289
anodynes of social medicine became evident artifice. Stoicism was
perhaps the best; religion was the most human; but the idea that
any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a
poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man
only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for
a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort*
God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not
be a Person.
With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped
for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world; for
the fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the world, which
he thought real, mimic and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his
personal horror. He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years
in finding it out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake be-
low and of the Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the
first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what
it was a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces and he
needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illu-
sions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its
light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind;
Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on
charms real as terrors; but man became chaotic, and before the
illusions of Nature were wholly restored, the illusions of Europe
suddenly vanished, leaving a new world to learn.
On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one
might have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal
with the chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams;
the Emperor Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bis-
marck himself hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-
break of the war was wholly lost on a man dealing with death
hand-to-hand, who could not throw it aside to look at it across the
Rhine. Only when he got up to Paris, he began to feel the approach
290 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
of catastrophe. Providence set up no affiches to announce the
tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut herself adrift, and floated
off, on an unknown stream, towards a less known ocean. Standing
on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as much as though
one stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an army
corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the
war, as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as
a^ branch of decorative art. The French, like true artists, always
regarded war as one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practfsecTit;
Napoleon I perfected it; and Napoleon III had till then pursued
it in tKeTsame spirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870,
the war was brought out like an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt
one's self a supernumerary hired to fill the scene. Every evening
at the theatre the comedy was interrupted by order, and one stood
up by order, to join in singing the Marseillaise to order. For nearly
twenty years one had been forbidden to sing the Marseillaise under
any circumstances, but at last regiment after regiment marched
through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while the bystanders
cared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been brought
out of the Government stores, and distributed by grammes per
capita. One had seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into
a war, and had watched one's own regiments march to the front
without sign of enthusiasm; on the contrary, most serious, anx-
ious, and conscious of the whole weight of the crisis; but in Paris
every one conspired to ignore the crisis, which every one felt at
hand. Here was education for the million, but the lesson was in-
tricate. Superficially Napoleon and his Ministers and marshals
were playing a game against Thiers and Gambetta. A bystander
knew almost as little as they did about the result. How could
Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he spoke of his
Paris and its tastes, people would smile at his dotage?
As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few re-
maining monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII
CHAOS 291
three or four young Englishmen survived there, with Milnes
Gaskell acting as Prior. The August sun was warm; the calm of the
Abbey was ten times secular; not a discordant sound hardly
a sound of any sort except the cawing of the ancient rookery at
sunset broke the stillness; and, after the excitement of the last
month, one felt a palpable haze of peace brooding over the Edge
and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of Pteraspis, nothing had
greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying on the turf,
the ground littered with newspapers, the monks studied the war
correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded in educat-
ing himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.
While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen
years for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a
Terebratula would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which
implied that the new President of Harvard College wanted his
help; but Adams knew nothing about history, and much less about
teaching, while he knew more than enough about Harvard Col-
lege; and wrote at once to thank President Eliot, with much re-
gret that the honor should be above his powers. His mind was
full of other matters. The summer, from which he had expected
only amusement and social relations with new people, had ended
in the most intimate personal tragedy, and the most terrific politi-
cal convulsion he had ever known or was likely to know. He had
failed in every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had refused his
best essay. He had made no acquaintances and hardly picked up
the old ones. He sailed from Liverpool, on September I, to begin
again where he had started two years before, but with no longer a
hope of attaching himself to a President or a party or a press. He
was a free lance and no other career stood in sight or mind. To
that point education had brought him.
Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
292 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment that
it had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and
circulated as a campaign document by the hundred thousand cop-
ies. He was henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a
Massachusetts Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only re-
ward or return for this partisan service consisted in being for-
mally answered by Senator Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a
Republican campaign document, presumed to be also freely cir-
culated, in which the Senator, besides refuting his opinions, did
him the honor most unusual and picturesque in a Senator's
rhetoric of likening him to a begonia.
The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial qualities
as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering. Far from charm-
ing in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable for curious and
showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to have no useful
purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the most prominent
positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia in
Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful states-
man, and he thought about it still more when the Westminster
Review for October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy,
which was also instatitly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was
himself henceforth driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated,
for he was sure not to be paid ; but the honors of piracy resemble the
colors of the begonia; they are showy but not useful. Here was
a tour de force he had never dreamed himself equal to performing:
two long, dry, quarterly, thirty or forty page articles, appearing in
quick succession, and pirated for audiences running well into the
hundred thousands; and not one person, man or woman, offering
him so much as a congratulation, except to call him a begonia.
Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as before,
but the ways of America to a young person of literary and political
tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized man had
not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington
CHAOS 293
what he modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole
family set on him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861
his father interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles
argued and urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles
had views of further joint operations in a new field. He said that
Henry had done at Washington all he could possibly do; that his
position there wanted solidity; that he was, after all, an adven-
turer; that a few years in Cambridge would give him personal
weight; that his chief function was not to be that of teacher, but
that of editing the North American Review which was to be coupled
with the professorship, and would lead to the daily press. In short,
that he needed the university more than the university needed
him.
Henry knew the university well enough to know that the de-
partment of history was controlled by one of the most astute
and ideal administrators in the world Professor Gurney and
that it was Gurney who had established the new professorship,
and had cast his net over Adams to carry the double load of
mediaeval history and the Review. He could see no relation what-
ever between himself and a professorship. He sought educa-
tion; he did not sell it. He knew no history; he knew only a few
historians; his ignorance was mischievous because it was literary,
accidental, indifferent. On the other hand he knew Gurney, and
felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot take one's self
quite seriously in such matters; it could not much affect the sum
of solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in Wash-
ington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good people
who thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide. One could
not reject their advice; still less disregard their wishes.
The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge
and had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him
almost as American as the talk about diplomacy with his father
ten years before. "But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know
nothing about Mediaeval History." With the courteous manner
294 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
and bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans,
Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, "If you will point out to
me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him."
The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams could
not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not
say that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any pro-
fessor at all seemed to him unnecessary.
y x/ So, at twenty-four hours 5 notice, he broke his life in halves again
in order to begin a new education, on lines he had not chosen, in
subjects for which he cared less than nothing; in a place he did
,not love, and before a future which repelled. Thousands of men
have to do the same thing, but his case was peculiar because he
had no need to do it. He did it because his best and wisest friends
urged it, and he never could make up his mind whether they were
right or not. To him this kind of education was always false. For
himself he had no doubts. He thought it a mistake; but his
opinion did not prove that it was one, since, in all probability,
whatever he did would be more or less a mistake. He had reached,
cross-roads of education which all led astray. What he could gain
at Harvard College he did not know, but in any case it was nothing
he wanted. What he lost at Washington he could partly see, but
in any case it was not fortune. Grant's administration wrecked
men by thousands, but profited few. Perhaps Mr. Fish was the
solitary exception. One might search the whole list of Congress,
Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870 to
1895, and find little but damaged reputation. The period was poor
in purpose and barren in results.
Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any politician,
and knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent at
Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in his opin-
ion, the best equipped, the most active-minded, and most indus-
trious was Abram Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen years,
between 1874 and 1886, sometimes leading the House and al-
ways wielding influence second to none. With nobody did Adams
CHAOS 295
form closer or longer relations than with Mr. Hewitt, whom he
regarded as the most useful public man in Washington; and he
was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end of his laborious
career as legislator, that he left behind him no permanent result ex-
cept the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew no other man
who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is accepted
as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would probably
have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil service
reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should never
have been allowed to be born. These were the men who succeeded.
The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political
writer, and no public administrator achieved enough good repu-
tation to preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them
achieved bad reputations, or damaged good ones that had been
gained in the Civil War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplo-
mats, and Cabinet officers, the period was wearisome and stale.
None of Adams's generation profited by public activity unless
it were William C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to
return to it. Such ambitions as these were out of one's reach, but
supposing one tried for what was feasible, attached one's self
closely to the Garfields, Arthurs, Frelinghuysens, Blaines, Bayards,
or Whitneys, who happened to hold office; and supposing one asked
for the mission to Belgium or Portugal, and obtained it; supposing
one served a term as Assistant Secretary or Chief of Bureau; or,
finally, supposing one had gone as sub-editor on the New York
Tribune or Times how much more education would one have
gained than by going to Harvard College? These questions
seemed better worth an answer than most of the questions on
examination papers at college or in the civil service; all the more
because one never found an answer to them, then or afterwards,
and because, to his mind, the value of American society alto-
gether was mixed up with the value of Washington.
At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles, wanted
to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare
296 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
and toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social or
political stupidity; but the American people had no more to do
with it than with the customs of Peking. American character
might perhaps account for it, but what accounted for American
character? All Boston, all New England, and all respectable New
York, including Charles Francis Adams the father and Charles
Francis Adams the son, agreed that Washington was no place for
a respectable young man. All Washington, including Presidents,
Cabinet officers, Judiciary, Senators, Congressmen, and clerks,
expressed the same opinion, and conspired to drive away every
young man who happened to be there, or tried to approach. Not
one young man of promise remained in the Government service.
All drifted into opposition. The Government did not want them
in Washington. Adams's case was perhaps the strongest because
he thought he had done well. He was forced to guess it, since he
knew no one who would have risked so extravagant a step as that
of encouraging a young man in a literary career, or even in a po-
litical one; society forbade it, as well as residence in a political
capital; but Harvard College must have seen some hope for him,
since it made him professor against his will; even the publishers
and editors of the North American Review must have felt a certain
amount of confidence in him, since they put the Review in his hands.
After all, the Review was the first literary power in America, even
though it paid almost as little in gold as the United States Treas-
ury. The degree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephem-
eral as the commission of a President of the United States; but
the government of the college, measured by money alone, and
patronage, was a matter of more importance than that of some
branches of the national service. In social position, the college was
the superior of them all put together. In knowledge, she could
assert no superiority, since the Government made no claims,
and prided itself on ignorance. The service of Harvard College
was distinctly honorable; perhaps the most honorable in America;
and if Harvard College thought Henry Adams worth employing at
CHAOS 297
four dollars a day, why should Washington decline his services
when he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a career
he liked in a place he loved, into a career he detested, in a place
and climate he shunned? Was it enough to satisfy him, that all
America should call Washington barren and dangerous? What
made Washington more dangerous than New York?
The American character showed singular limitations which some-
times drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by
his own ignorance lost in the darkness of his own gropings
the scholar finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men
who seem to him ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance;
who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot even
understand that they are bored. The American thought of him-
self as a restless, pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always
awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors. Perhaps this idea
of the national character might be correct for New York or Chicago;
it was not correct for Washington. There the American showed
himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in
the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pa-
thetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrust-
ful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.
That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true;
work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice;
but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from
it; he had no use for wealth. Jim Fisk alone seemed to know what
he wanted; Jay Gould never did. At Washington one met mostly
such true Americans, but if one wanted to know them better, one
went to study them in Europe. Bored, patient, helpless; patheti-
cally dependent on his wife and daughters; indulgent to excess;
mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable citizen; the American
was to be met at every railway station in Europe, carefully ex-
plaining to every listener that the happiest day of his life would be
the day he should land on the pier at New York. He was ashamed
298 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
to be amused ; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of va-
riety; he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength,
his intense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were
oriented in one direction, and he could not change it. Congress
was full of such men; in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only
exception; in the Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of
the type political specimens pathetic in their helplessness to
do anything with power when it came to them. They knew not
how to amuse themselves; they could not conceive how other
people were amused. Work, whiskey, and cards were life. The at-
mosphere of political Washington was theirs or was supposed
by the outside world to be in their control and this was the
reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal
even for a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the
whole variety of temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a
dozen years; who never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.
CHAPTER XX
FAILURE (1871)
FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry
Adams could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He
must have been nine years old when on one of the singularly
gloomy winter afternoons which beguiled Cambridgeport, his
mother drove him out to visit his aunt, Mrs. Everett. Edward
Everett was then President of the college and lived in the old
President's House on Harvard Square. The boy remembered the
drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which Mrs. Everett
received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the corner.
The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed even
a nine-year-old child.
When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had
been turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen ad-
jacent to it were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother
Brooks, then a law student, had rooms, with a private staircase.
Opposite was J. R. Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary
as Adams himself, and more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry
revealed a boarding-table, somewhere in the neighborhood, also
supposed to be superior in its class. Chauncey Wright, Francis
Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their equivalents in learning
and lecture, were seen there, among three or four law students
like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements, all of
them had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of Wash-
ington, but it was, for the moment, the best.
For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether
300 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please
him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what
to do.
The fault he had found with Harvard College as an under-
graduate must have been more or less just, for the college was
making a great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected
President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney
was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his
own department of History. The two full Professors of History
Torrey and Gurney, charming men both could not cover
the ground. Between Gurney's classical courses and Torrey's
modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was
expected to fill. The students had already elected courses num-
bered I, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or who
was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was in
their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to
the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face,
he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less,
to the Middle Ages.
Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course^ had led him through oceans of ignorance;
he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned
to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. j\ parent
gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life,
but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never
tell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth,
and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with
the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches
truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite
another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher
must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as
an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls
into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars
FAILURE 301
either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarch-
ists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral,
history had either to be taught as such "or falsified' ~
Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution
to teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy
for telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order
to publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel
his students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Vener-
able Bede by heart. He saw no relation whatever between his
students and the Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there
the ground was particularly dangerous. He knew better than
though he were a professional historian that the man who should
solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring them into the line
of evolution from past to present, would be a greater man than
Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken down so
pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there. Since
Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. Historj^had Jbst
even the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the ex-
perimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instruc-
tive than Walter Scott and Alexandra Dumas.
All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler, Mc-
Lennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers
who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more
scandalous. No doubt, a teacher might make some use of these
writers or their theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory
of his own. The college expected him to pass at least half his time
in teaching the boys a few elementary dates and relations, that
they might not be a disgrace to the university. This was formal :
and he could frankly tell the boys that, provided they passed their
examinations, they might get their facts where they liked, and
use the teacher only for questions. The only privilege a student
had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the pro-
fessor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His onl}
difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all He had tc
302 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and in-
duce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of
students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-
a^lozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one
of its cost in money.
The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose
minds were of an order above the average was, in his experience,
barely one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any
inducements a teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and
in seven years of contact, Adams never had cause to complain of
one; but nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard sur-
face; only the tenth sensibly reacts.
Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a
teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to
teach his scholars what he did not know, but should join them in
trying to find the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious
name of historical method was sometimes given to this process of
instruction, but the name smacked of German pedagogy, and a
young professor who respected neither history nor method, and
whose sole object of interest was his students' minds, fell into
trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.
The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could
not control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method,
but, when learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein
that one may take up at any point, and break when one has un-
ravelled enough; but complexity precedes evolution. The Pter-
aspis grins horribly from the closed entrance. One may not begin
at the beginning, and one has but the loosest relative truths to
follow up. Adams found himself obliged to force his material into
FAILURE 303
some shape to which a method could be applied. He could think
only of law as subject; the Law School as end; and he took, as
victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly intelligent young
men who seemed willing to work. The course began with the
beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive
man, and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman
English. Since no textbooks existed, the professor refused to
profess, knowing no more than his students, and the students read
what they pleased and compared their results. As pedagogy, noth-
ing could be more triumphant. The boys worked like rabbits,
and dug holes all over the field of archaic society; no difficulty
stopped them; unknown languages yielded before their attack,
and customary law became familiar as the police court; undoubt-
edly they learned, after a fashion, to chase an idea, like a hare,
through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely to
meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience
that his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to
exert themselves to get rid of it in the Law School even more than
they exerted themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science
had no system, and could have none, since its subject was merely
antiquarian. Try as hard as he might, the professor could not make
it actual.
What was the use of training an active mind to waste its en-
ergy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor,
but this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the
boys to a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the
intellectual reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or
the students. For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the
system, which could lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge
of himself as he possessed warranted him in affirming that his
mind required conflict, competition, contradiction even more than
that of the student. He too wanted a rank-list to set his name upon.
His reform of the system would have begun in the lecture-room at
his own desk. He would have seated a rival assistant professor
304 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
opposite him, whose business should be strictly limited to express-
ing opposite views. Nothing short of this would ever interest
either the professor or the student; but of all university freaks,
no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere so much as
contradiction or competition between teachers. In that respect
the thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole
teaching of the modern school.
All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of in-
struction. In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady,
generous, liberal support, the system remained costly, clumsy and
futile. The university as far as it was represented by Henry
Adams produced at great waste of time and money results not
worth reaching.
He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to in-
flict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was
in the full tide of fashion* The Germans were crowning their new
emperor at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo of
Pepins and Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had
even discovered the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never
so powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing
else as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars
with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he sometimes doubted
whether they should be grateful. On the whole, he was content
neither with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught
it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.
The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a pro-
fessor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many ex-
periments, and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to
the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that he
tried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous
to the teachers than to the students; fallacious from the beginning
to end. He quitted the university at last, in 1877, with a feeling,
FAILURE 305
that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and kindness
shown by every one in it, from the President to the injured stu-
dents, he should be sore at his failure.
These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so
much disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college in-
sisted on expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in
his notice of the family in " Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that
Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which was
a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily re-
turned; and set the kind expression down to camaraderie. The
case was different when President Eliot himself hinted that Ad-
ams's services merited recognition. Adams could have wept on his
shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the rare good-will that
inspired the compliment; but he could not allow the college to
think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction. He knew
better, and his was among the failures which were respectable
enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life
struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which
he had persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected,
should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encourage-
ment, or a kindness. Harvard College might have its faults, but
at least it redeemed America, since it was true to its own.
The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more
or less in the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment,
and, except for the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that
man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flow-
ers at the sunlight of a suggestion. They were quick to respond;
plastic to a mould; and incapable of fatigue. Their faith in edu-
cation was so full of pathos that one dared not t ask them what
they thought they could do with education when they got it.
Adams did put the question to one of them, and was surprised at
the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is worth money to
306 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
me in Chicago/ 7 This reply upset his experience; for the degree
of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young
man in Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was
good, and settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although
he had given twenty years to pursuing the same education, and
was no nearer a result than they. He still had to take for granted
many things that they need not among the rest, that his teach-
ing did them more good than harm. In his own opinion the great-
est good he could do them was to hold his tongue. They needed
much faith then; they were likely to need more if they lived long.
He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical
atom whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pre-
tend that mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of
Physics smiled at evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the
virtues of the Church and the triumphs of its art: the Profes-
sor of Political Economy had to treat them as waste of force.
They knew what they had to teach; he did not. They might per-
haps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly noth-
ing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was
only educating himself at their cost.
Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor
has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.
The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained some-
thing. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twen-
tieth century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fer-
vently hoped that they might remain content; but supposing
twenty years more to pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely
as he had turned on his old instructors what answer could he
make? The college had pleaded guilty, and tried to reform. He
had pleaded guilty from the start, and his reforms had failed be-
fore those of the college.
FAILURE 307
The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for
help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Con-
gressmen and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same
failure marked the society of a college. Several score of the best-
educated, most agreeable, and personally the most sociable people
in America united in Cambridge to make a social desert that would
have starved a polar bear. The liveliest and most agreeable of
men James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz,
his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a
dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or Paris
tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge
and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors
they had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for
companionship, all were famished for want of it. Society was a
faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but
society cannot be made up of elements people who are expected
to be silent unless they have observations to make and all the
elements are bound to remain apart if required to make observa-
tions.
Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to
admit that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner
still. The editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write.
If copy fell short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the
virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew
more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did
about President Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing; the
Review lived on his brother Charles's railway articles. The editor
could help others, but could do nothing for himself. As a writer,
he was totally forgotten by the time he had been an editor for
twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to take his place
for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review became
308 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him
to keep it literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose suc-
cesses, if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures
might easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink
of money with captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor
were easily learned; the highest was that of getting advertise-
ments. Ten pages of advertising made an editor a success; five
marked him as a failure. The merits or demerits of his literature
had little to do with his results except when they led to adversity.
A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his appe-
tite for that career as a profession. After a very slight experience,
he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let any one edit,
if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog's life
when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A professor
had at least the pleasure of associating with his students; an edi-
tor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a peda-
gogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising.
On the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was
educated enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty
dollars a month.
With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into life,
stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best
could, with such accidental education as luck had given him;
but he held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again,
he would do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly
what system to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not
yet got his head above water so far as to serve for a model, as
he did twenty or thirty years afterwards; but the editorship of
the North American Review had one solitary merit; it made the
editor acquainted at a distance with almost every one in the coun-
try who could write or who could be the cause of writing. Adams
was vastly pleased to be received among these clever people as one
of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at their treating
him as an equal, for they all had education; but among them, only
FAILURE
309
one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and model
of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American,
as he conceived, should have been and was not.
Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were as
a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely
few. One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neigh-
bor in Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined
the Fortieth Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington
in the winter of 1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out
with him on one of the field-parties in summer. Of course when
Adams took the Review he put it at the service of the Survey, and
regretted only that he could not do more. When the first year of
professing and editing was at last over, and his July North Ameri-
can appeared, he drew a long breath of relief, and took the next
train for the West. Of his year's work he was no judge. He had
become a small spring in a large mechanism, and his work counted
only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody, and
he felt at home even in Boston. Putting in his pocket the July
number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Par-
allel Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he started for the plains
and the Rocky Mountains.
In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union Pacific
was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere of
Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old educa-
tion, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adams
sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future. The
Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in
case of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topog-
raphers and geologists thought more about minerals than about
Sioux. They held under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral
country with all its riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth
to mark. They felt the future in their hands.
310 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge
of Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter
nothing to the story of education. They were all hardened moun-
taineers and surveyors who took everything for granted, and spared
each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch life,
the stories of the big game they killed. A bear was an occasional
amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the only wild
animal dangerous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot
for amusement, but one had other matters to talk about.
Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of cutting
it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a man-
ner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped
high above Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed
a rod, and rode down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some
trout. The day was fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires
a thousand miles away; the park stretched its English beauties
off to the base of its bordering mountains in natural landscape
and archaic peace; the stream was just fishy enough to tempt
lingering along its banks. Hour after hour the sun" moved west-
ward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared altogether,
until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule, sunset was
nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he could
catch his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot hole,
he "allowed" he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he
was out of the hills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw
no prospect of supper or of bed.
Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule
cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest against
FAILURE 311
the stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded on
without other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some
two hours must have passed before a light showed in the distance.
As the mule came up to the cabin door, two or three men came
out to see the stranger.
One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons;
they were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing
to do with the accident of space. King had come up that day from
Greeley in a light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for
a commissariat mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went
back in the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a room and one
bed for guests. They shared the room and the bed, and talked till
far towards dawn.
King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew
more than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, espe-
cially west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he
knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better
than he did the professor. He knew even women ; even the Ameri-
can woman; even the New York woman, which is saying much.
Incidentally he knew more practical geology than was good for
him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than the text-
books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the be-
ginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right;
the charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great
deal more. His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept
every one into the current of his interest; his personal charm of
youth and manners; his faculty of giving and taking, profusely,
lavishly, whether in thought or in money as though he were Nature
herself, marked him almost alone among Americans. He had in
him something of the Greek a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander.
One Clarence King only existed in the world.
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old,
312 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One
friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possi-
ble. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their gener-
ation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his career.
The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle
the same stock of implements the same field to work in; above
all, the same obstacles to overcome.
As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the
quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even
distant rivalry on this ground. Adams could never tell a story,
chiefly because he always forgot it; and he was never guilty of
a witticism, unless by accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel
influenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives con-
verged, but King had moulded and directed his life logically, scien-
tifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed.
He had given himself education all of a piece, yet broad. Stand-
ing in the middle of his career, where their paths at last came to-
gether, he could look back and look forward on a straight line,
with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life, past or future,
was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no base at all.
King's abnormal energy had already won him great success. None
of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress
to adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organ-
ized, as a civil not military measure, a Government Survey.
He had paralleled the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as
yet unequalled by other governments which had as a rule no con-
tinents to survey. He was creating one of the classic scientific
works of the century. The chances were great that he could,
whenever he chose to quit the Government service, take the pick
of the gold and silver, copper or coal, and build up his fortune
FAILURE 313
as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted lay ready for him
scientific, social, literary, political and he knew how to take
them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the richest
and most many-sided genius of his day.
So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of his
extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women
were many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so
much their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be.
The women were jealous because, at heart, King had no faith in
the American woman; he loved types more robust.
The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian instincts;
they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings towards
the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little proof of
slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the law
of changejj:hey cared little for simplicity and much for complexity;
6ut ft was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or even of
the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them like
rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to
persuade him that history was more amusing than science. The
only question left open to doubt was their relative money value.
In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were con-
tinued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer
far away. No more education was possible for either man. Such
as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world they
lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge, to take
up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was har-
nessed to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had done
its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.
CHAPTER XXI
TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
ONCE more ! this is a story of education, not of adventure !
It is meant to help young men or such as have intel-
ligence enough to seek help but it is not meant to
amuse them. What one did or did not do with one's edu-
cation, after getting it, need trouble the inquirer in no way; it is
a personal matter only which would confuse him. Perhaps Henry
Adams was not worth educating; most keen judges incline to think
that barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of re-
acting to any purpose on the forces that surround him, and fully
half of these react wrongly. The object of education for that mind
should be the teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy.
No doubt the world at large will always lag so far behind the active
mind as to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did
for Henry Adams; but education should try to lessen the ob-
stacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should
train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines
of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth,
of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling,
and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to pro-
mote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the
world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly
fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or the
viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-
fourths of their energy in doing it.
Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871,
and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At the
end of twenty years, he found that he had finished, and could
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 315
sum up the result. He had no complaint to make against man or
woman. They had all treated him kindly; he had never met with
ill-will, ill- temper, or even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He
had never seen serious dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a
readiness in the young to respond to suggestion that seemed to
him far beyond all he had reason to expect. Considering the stock
complaints against the world, he could not understand why he
had nothing to complain of.
During these twenty years he had done as much work, in quan-
tity, as his neighbors wanted ; more than they would ever stop to
look at, and more than his share. Merely in print, he thought
altogether ridiculous the number of^volumes He counted on the
shelves of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served
a useful purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of
his friends, even the artists, none of whom held any lofty opinion
of their success in raising the standards of society, or felt pro-
found respect for the methods or manners of their time, at home
or abroad, but all of whom had tried, in a way, to hold the stand-
ard up. The effort had been, for the older generation, exhausting,
as one could see in the Hunts; but the generation after 1870 made
more figure, not in proportion to public wealth or in the census, but
in their own self-assertion. A fair number of the men who were
born in the thirties had won names Phillips Brooks; Bret Harte;
Henry James; H. H. Richardson; John La Farge; and the list might
be made fairly long if it were worth while; but from their school
had sprung others, like Augustus St. Gaudens, McKim, Stanford
White, and scores born in the forties, who counted as force even
in the mental inertia of sixty or eighty million people. Among all
these Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest
existences, trying to fill in the social gaps of a class which, as yet,
showed but thin ranks and little cohesion. The combination offered
no very glittering prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years with
as much patience and effort as though it led to fame or power, until,
at last, Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficiently performed
316 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
and his account with society settled. He had enjoyed his life amaz-
ingly, and would not have exchanged it for any other that came
in his way; he was, or thought he was, perfectly satisfied with
it; but for reasons that had nothing to do with education, he was
tired; his nervous energy ran low; and, like a horse that wears out,
he quitted the race-course, left the stable, and sought pastures as
far as possible from the old. Education had ended in 1871 ; life was
complete in 1890; the rest mattered so little!
As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the
question of return imposed its verdict on him after much fruitless
effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of January, 1892;
he was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of midwinter. He was
close on his fifty-fourth birthday, and Pall Mall had forgotten him
as completely as it had forgotten his elders. He had not seen Lon-
don for a dozen years, and was rather amused to have only a
bed for a world and a familiar black fog for horizon. The coal-fire
smelt homelike; the fog had a fruity taste of youth; anything was
better than being turned out into the wastes of Wigmore Street.
He could always amuse himself by living over his youth, and driv-
ing once more down Oxford Street in 1858, with life before him to
imagine far less amusing than it had turned out to be.
The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week he re-
flected on what he could do next. He had just come up from the
South Seas with John La Farge, who had reluctantly crawled
away towards New York to resume the grinding routine of studio-
work at an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as choice,
have gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in the
trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark
purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not that
he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly he had
felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard Kipling's "Manda-
lay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem, like millions
of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world exactly as it
is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of beginning a new
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 317
education. The old one had been poor enough; any new one could
only add to its faults. Life had been cut in halves, and the old half
had passed away, education and all, leaving no stock to graft on.
The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him
fantastic. Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some kind
of existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it reason-
able. In Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the dismal
ballets at the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at the old
Palais Royal; but, except for them, his own Paris of the Second
Empire was as extinct as that of the first Napoleon. At the gal-
leries and exhibitions, he was racked by the effort of art to be
original, and when one day, after much reflection, John La Farge
asked whether there might not still be room for something simple
in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the world, it was no
longer simple and could not express itself simply. It should express
what it was; and this was something that neither Adams nor
La Farge understood.
Under the first blast of this furnace-heat, the lights seemed fairly
to go out. He felt nothing in common with the world as it promised
to be. He was ready to quit it, and the easiest path led back to the
east; but he could not venture alone, and the rarest of animals is
a companion. He must return to America to get one. Perhaps, while
waiting, he might write more history, and on the chance as a last
resource, he gave orders fpr copying everything he could reach
in archives, but this was mere habit. Jie went home as a horse
goes back to his stablej because he, knew nowhere else to go.
^TTome was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration
ended, in 1877, and Evarts became Secretary of State, Adams
went back there, partly to write history, but chiefly because his
seven years of laborious banishment, in Boston, convinced him
that, as far as he had a function in life, it was as stable-companion
to statesmen, whether they liked it or not. At about the same time,
old George Bancroft did the same thing, and presently John Hay
came on to be Assistant Secretary of State for Mr. Evarts, and
318 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
stayed there to write the "Life" of Lincoln. In 1884 Adams joined
him in employing Richardson to build them adjoining houses on
La Fayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this was it.
To the house on La Fayette Square he must turn, for he had no
other status no position in the world.
Never did he make a decision more reluctantly than this of going
back to his manger. His father and mother were dead. All his
family led settled lives of their own. Except for two or three
friends in Washington, who were themselves uncertain of stay,
no one cared whether he came or went, and he cared least. There
was nothing to care about. Every one was busy; nearly every one
seemed contented. Since 1871 nothing had ruffled the surface of
the American world, and even the progress of Europe in her side-
way track to dis-Europeaning herself had ceased to be violent.
After a dreary January in Paris, at last when no excuse could be
persuaded to offer itself for further delay, he crossed the channel
and passed a week with his old friend, Milnes Gaskell, at Thornes,
in Yorkshire, while the westerly gales raved a warning against go-
ing home. Yorkshire in January is not an island in the South Seas.
It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti; not many to Fiji or
Samoa; but, as so often before, it was a rest between past and
future, and Adams was grateful for it.
At last, on February 3, he drove, after a fashion, down the Irish
Channel, on board the Teutonic. He had not crossed the Atlantic
for a dozen years, and had never seen an ocean steamer of the new
type. He had seen nothing new of any sort, or much changed in
France or England. The railways made quicker time, but were
no more comfortable. The scale was the same. The Channel serv-
ice was hardly improved since 1858, or so little as to make no
impression. Europe seemed to have been stationary for twenty
years. To a man who had been stationary like Europe, the Teu-
tonic was a marvel. That he should be able to eat his dinner through
a week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That he should have
a deck stateroom, with fresh air, and read all night, if he chose, by
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 319
electric light, was matter for more wonder than life had yet sup-
plied, in its old forms, Wonder may be double even treble.
Adams's wonder ran off into figures. As the Niagara was to
the Teutonic as 1860 was to 1890 so the Teutonic and 1890
must be to the next term and then? Apparently the question
concerned only America. Western Europe offered no such conun-
drum. There one might double scale and speed indefinitely with-
out passing bounds.
Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling, on his wed-
ding trip to America, thanks to the mediation of Henry James,
dashed over the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and
wit ^though i playing^ a^g^j^Im ho^Qft a thirsty and faded
begonia. Kipling could never know what peace of mind he gave, for
he could hardly ever need it himself so much; and yet, in the full
delight of his endless fun and variety, one felt the old conundrum
repeat itself. Somehow, somewhere, Kipling and the American
were not one, but two, and could not be glued together. The Amer-
ican felt that the defect, if defect it were, was in himself; he had felt
it when he was with Swinburne, and, again, with Robert Louis
Stevenson, even under the palms of Vailima; but he did not carry
self-abasement to the point of thinking himself singular. Whatever
the defect might be, it was American; it belonged to the type; it
lived in the blood. Whatever the quality might be that held him
apart, it was English; it lived also in the blood; one felt it little if
at all, with Celts, and one yearned reciprocally among Fiji canni-
bals. Clarence King used to say that it was due to discord be-
tween the wave-lengths of the man-atoms; but the theory offered
difficulties in measurement. Perhaps, after all, it was only that
genius soars; but this theory, too, had its dark corners. All through
life, one had seen the American on his literary knees to the Euro-
pean; and all through many lives back for some two centuries, one
had seen the European snub or patronize the American; not always
intentionally, but effectually. It was in the nature of things. Kip-
ling neither snubbed nor patronized; he was all gaiety and good-
320 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
nature; but he would have been first to feel what one meant.
Genius has to pay itself that unwilling self-respect.
Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself
again in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing
to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty
of reasons for staying dead. Changes had taken place there; im-
provements had been made; with time much time the city
might become habitable according to some fashionable standard;
but all one's friends had died or disappeared several times over,
leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or London. Slowly, a
certain society had built itself up about the Government; houses
had been opened and there was much dining; much calling; much
leaving of cards; but a solitary man counted for less than in 1868.
Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both Executive
and Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have the
ear of anybody in Government. No one in Government knew any
reason for consulting any one in society. The world had ceased to
be wholly political, but politics had become less social. A survivor
of the Civil War like George Bancroft, or John Hay tried
to keep footing, but without brilliant success. They were free to
say or do what they liked, but no one took much notice of any-
thing said or done.
A presidential election was to take place in November, and no
one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were
singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of
them had no friends; the other, only enemies. Calvin Brice, who
was at that time altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of
the Senate, was in the habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in glow-
ing terms and at great length, as one of the loftiest natures and
noblest characters of ancient or modern time; "but," he concluded,
"in future I prefer to look on at his proceedings from the safe
summit of some neighboring hill." The same remark applied to
Mr. Harrison. In this respect, they were the greatest of Presi-
dents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies, was as
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 321
nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on their
friends. Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To the
American people, the two candidates and the two parties were so
evenly balanced that the scales showed hardly a perceptible dif-
ference. v]VIr. Harrison was an excellent President, a man of abil-
ity and force; perhaps the best President the Republican Party
had put forward since Lincoln's death; yet, on the whole, Adams
felt a shade of preference for President Cleveland, not so much
personally as because the Democrats represented to him the last
remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of Hosea Big-
low's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a bank-
er's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years, more
and more despotic over Esop's frog-empire. One might no longer
croak except to vote for King Log, or failing storks for
Grover Cleveland; and even then could not be sure where King
Banker lurked behind. The costly education in politics had led to
political torpor. Every one did not share it. Clarence King and
John Hay were loyal Republicans who never for a moment con-
ceived that there could be merit in other ideals. With King, the
feeling was chiefly love of archaic races; sympathy with the negro
and Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies; but with
Hay, party loyalty became a phase of being, a little like the
loyalty of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw
all the failings of the party, and still more keenly those of the
partisans; but he could not live outside. To Adams a Western
Democrat or a Western Republican, a city Democrat or a city
Republican, a W. C. Whitney or a J. G. Elaine, were actually the
same man, as far as their usefulness to the objects of King, Hay,
or Adams was concerned. They graded themselves as friends or
enemies, not as Republicans or Democrats. To Hay, the diifer-
ence was that of being respectable or not.
Since 1879, King, Hay, and Adams had been inseparable. Step
by step, they had gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shun-
ning than inviting public position, until, in 1892, none of them
322 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
held any post at all. With great effort, in Hayes's administra-
tion, all King's friends, including Abram Hewitt and Carl Schurz,
had carried the bill for uniting the Surveys and had placed King
at the head of the Bureau; but King waited only to organize the
service, and then resigned, in order to seek his private fortune in
the West. Hay, after serving as Assistant Secretary of State under
Secretary Evarts during a part of Hayes's administration, then
also insisted on going out, in order to write with Nicolay the
"Life" of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and when his
friends asked the reason, he could not go into long explanations,
but preferred to answer simply that no President had ever in-
vited him to fill one. The reason was good, and was also con-
veniently true, but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or
capacity. Why had no President ever cared to employ him? The
question needed a volume of intricate explanation. There never
was a day when he would have refused to perform any duty that
the Government imposed on him, but the American Government
never to his knowledge imposed duties. The point was never
raised with regard to him, or to any one else. The Government
required candidates to offer; the business of the Executive began
and ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social for-
mula carried this passive attitude a shade further. Any public
man who may for years have used some other man's house as his
own, when promoted to a position of patronage commonly feels
himself obliged to inquire, directly or indirectly, whether his
friend wants anything; which is equivalent to a civil act of di-
vorce, since he feels awkward in the old relation. The handsom-
est formula, in an impartial choice, was the grandly courteous
Southern phrase of Lamar: "Of course Mr. Adams knows that
anything in my power is at his service/' A la disposition de
Usted! The form must have been correct since it released both
parties. He was right; Mr. Adams did know all about it; a bow
and a conventional smile closed the subject forever, and every one
felt flattered.
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 323
Such an intimate, promoted to power, was always lost. His
duties and cares absorbed him and affected his balance of mind.
Unless his friend served some political purpose, friendship was an
effort. Men who neither wrote for newspapers nor made cam-
paign speeches, who rarely subscribed to the campaign fund, and
who entered the White House as seldom as possible, placed them-
selves outside the sphere of usefulness, and did so with entirely
adequate knowledge of what they were doing. They never ex-
pected the President to ask for their services, and saw no reason
why he should do so. As for Henry Adams, in fifty years that he
knew Washington, no one would have been more surprised than
himself had any President ever asked him to perform so much of
a service as to cross the square. Only Texan Congressmen imag-
ined that the President needed their services in some remote con-
sulate after worrying him for months to find one.
In Washington this law or custom is universally understood,
and no one's character necessarily suffered because he held no of-
fice. No one took office unless he wanted it; and in turn the out-
sider was never asked to do work or subscribe money. Adams saw
no office that he wanted, and he gravely thought that, from his
point of view, in the long run, he was likely to be a more useful
citizen without office. He could at least act as audience, and, in
those days, a Washington audience seldom filled even a small
theatre. He felt quite well satisfied to look on, and from time to
time he thought he might risk a criticism of lEe players; but though
he found his own position regular, he never quite understood that
of John Hay. The Republican leaders treated Hay as one of
themselves; they asked his services and took his money with a
freedom that staggered even a hardened observer; but they never
needed him in equivalent office. In Washington Hay was the only
competent man in the party for diplomatic work. He corresponded
in his powers of usefulness exactly with Lord Granville in London,
who had been for forty years the saving grace of every Liberal
administration in turn. Had usefulness to the public service been
324 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ever a question, Hay should have had a first-class mission under
Hayes; should have been placed in the Cabinet by Garfield, and
should have been restored to it by Harrison. These gentlemen
were always using him; always invited his services, and always
took his money.
Adams's opinion of politics and politicians, as he frankly ad-
mitted, lacked enthusiasm, although never, in his severest temper,
did he apply to them the terms they freely applied to each other;
and he explained everything by his old explanation of Grant's
character as more or less a general type; but what roused in his
mind more rebellion was the patience and good-nature with which
Hay allowed himself to be used. The trait was not confined to
politics. Hay seemed to like to be used, and this was one of his
many charms; but in politics this sort of good-nature demands
supernatural patience. Whatever astonishing lapses of social
convention the politicians betrayed, Hay laughed equally heartily,
and told the stories with constant amusement, at his own expense.
Like most Americans, he liked to play at making Presidents, but,
unlike most, he laughed not only at the Presidents he helped to
make, but also at himself for laughing.
One must be rich, and come from Ohio or New York, to gratify
an expensive taste like this. Other men, on both political flanks,
did the same thing, and did it well, less for selfish objects than for
the amusement of the game; but Hay alone lived in Washington
and in the centre of the Ohio influences that ruled the Republican
Party during thirty years. On the whole, these influences were
respectable, and although Adams could not, under any circum-
stances, have had any value, even financially, for Ohio politicians,
Hay might have much, as he showed, if they only knew enough
to appreciate him. The American politician was occasionally an
amusing object; Hay laughed, and, for want of other resource,
Adams laughed too; but perhaps it was partly irritation at seeing
how President Harrison dealt his cards that made Adams wel-
come President Cleveland back to the White House.
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 325
At all events, neither Hay nor King nor Adams had much to
gain by reflecting Mr. Harrison in 1892, or by defeating him, as
far as he was concerned; and as far as concerned Mr. Cleveland,
they seemed to have even less personal concern. The whole coun-
try, to outward appearance, stood in much the same frame of
mind. Everywhere was slack-water. Hay himself was almost as
languid and indifferent as Adams. Neither had occupation. Both
had finished their literary work. The "Life" of Lincoln had been
begun, completed, and published hand in hand with the "History"
of Jefferson and Madison, so that between them they had written
nearly all the American history there was to write. The inter-
mediate period needed intermediate treatment; the gap between
James Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially
filled by either of them. Both were heartily tired of the subject,
and America seemed as tired as they. What was worse, the re-
deeming energy of Americans which had generally served as the
resource of minds otherwise vacant, the creation of new force,
the application of expanding power, showed signs of check. Even
the year before, in 1891, far off in the Pacific, one had met every-
where in the East a sort of stagnation a creeping paralysis
complaints of shipping and producers that spread throughout
the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange and sil-
ver-production loomed large. Credit was shaken, and a change of
party government might shake it even in Washington. The mat-
ter did not concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always
richest when the rich were poor; but it helped to dull the vibra-
tion of society.
However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the
last twenty years, for the three friends, King, Hay, and Adams,
was exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years,
but what had they gained? They often discussed the question.
Hay had a singular faculty for remembering faces, and would
break off suddenly the thread of his talk, as he looked out of the
window on La Fayette Square, to notice an old corps commander
326 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
or admiral of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his
cards or his cocktail: "There is old Dash who broke the rebel
lines at Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of
war!" Or what drew Adams's closer attention: "There goes
old Boutwell gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they
went! Men who had swayed the course of empire as well as the
coufse of Hay, King, and Adams, less valued than the ephemeral
Congressman behind them, who could not have told whether the
general was a Boutwell or Boutwell a general. Theirs was the
highest known success, and one asked what it was worth to them.
Apart from personal vanity, what would they sell it for? Would
any one of them, from President downwards, refuse ten thousand
a year in place of all the consideration he received from the world
on account of his success ?
Yet consideration had value, and at that time Adams enjoyed
lecturing Augustus St. Gaudens, in hours of depression, on its
economics: "Honestly you must admit that even if you don't pay
your expenses you get a certain amount of advantage from doing
the best work. Very likely some of the really successful Ameri-
cans would be willing you should come to dinner sometimes, if you
did not come too often, while they would think twice about Hay,
and would never stand me." The forgotten statesman had no
value at all; the general and admiral not much; the historian but
little; on the whole, the artist stood best, and of course, wealth
rested outside the question, since it was acting as judge; but, in
the last resort, the judge certainly admitted that consideration
had some value as an asset, though hardly as much as ten or
five thousand a year.
Hay and Adams had the advantage of looking out of their win-
dows on the antiquities of La Fayette Square, with the sense of
having all that any one had; all that the world had to offer; all
that they wanted in life, including their names on scores of title-
pages and in one or two biographical dictionaries; but this had
nothing to do with consideration, and they knew no more than
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 327
Boutwell or St. Gaudens whether to call it success. Hay had
passed ten years in writing the "Life" of Lincoln, and^perhaps
President Lincoln was the better for it, but what Hay goFfrom it
was not so easy to see, except the privilege of seeing popular book-
makers steal from his book and cover the theft by abusing the
author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson and
Madison, with expenses which, in any mercantile business, could
hardly have been reckoned at less than a hundred thousand dol-
lars, on a salary of five thousand a year; and when he asked what
return he got from this expenditure, rather more extravagant in
proportion to his means than a racing-stable, he could see none
whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Park-
man never printed a first edition of his relatively cheap and popu-
lar volumes, numbering more than seven hundred copies, until
quite at the end of his life. A thousand copies of a book that cost
twenty dollars or more was as much as any author could expect;
two thousand copies was a visionary estimate unless it were can-
vassed for subscription. As far as Adams knew, he had but three
serious readers Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh, and Hay
himself. He was amply satisfied with their consideration, and
could dispense with that of the other fifty-nine million, nine hun-
dred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven;
but neither he nor Hay was better off in any other respect, and
their chief title to consideration was their right to look out of their
windows on great men, alive or dead, in La Fayette Square, a
privilege which had nothing to do with their writings.
The world was always good-natured; civil; glad to be amused;
open-armed to any one who amused it; patient with every one
who dicTriot Insist on putting himself in, its way, or costing it
money; but this was not consideration, still less power in any of
its concrete forms, and applied as well or better to a comic actor.
Certainly a rare soprano or tenor voice earned infinitely more
applause as it gave infinitely more pleasure, even in America; but
one does what one can with one's means, and casting up one's
328 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
balance sheet, one expects only a reasonable return on one's capi-
tal. Hay and Adams had risked nothing and never played for
high stakes. King had followed the ambitious course. He had
played for many millions. He had more than once come close
to a great success, but the result was still in doubt, and meanwhile
he was passing the best years of his life underground. For com-
panionship he was mostly lost.
Thus, in 1892, neither Hay, King, nor Adams knew whether
they had attained success, or how to estimate it, or what to call
it; and the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than
they. Indeed, the American people had no idea at all; they were
wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had
ever trodden about Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden
calves to worship. They had lost the sense of worship; for the
idea that they worshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of
money was an old-world trait; a healthy appetite akin to worship
of the Gods, or to worship of power in any concrete shape; but the
American wasted money more recklessly than any one ever did
before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court
aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not what
to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make more,
or throw it away. Probably, since human society began, it had
seen no such curious spectacle as the houses of the San Francisco
millionaires on Nob Hill. Except for the railway system, the enor-
ijious wealth taken out of the ground since 1840, had disappeared.
West of the Alleghenies, the whole country might have been swept
clean, and could have been replaced in better form within one or
;two years. The American mind had less respect for money than
"the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its loss more easily; but
it had been deflected by its pursuit till it could turn in no other
direction. It shunned, distrusted, disliked, the dangerous attrac-
tion of ideals, and stood alone in history for its ignorance of the
past.
Personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 329
notice. His first step, on returning to Washington, took him out
to the cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see the bronze figure
which St. Gaudens had made for him in his absence. Naturally
every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the artist;
every change of light and shade; every point of relation; every
possible doubt of St. Gaudens's correctness of taste or feeling;
so that, as the spring approached, he was apt to stop there often
to see what the figure had to tell him that was new; but, in all
that it had to say, he never once thought of questioning what it
meant. He supposed its meaning to be the one commonplace
about it the oldest idea known to human thought. He knew
that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man, woman, or
child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more than
a glance to reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura
Daibuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to
Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though
it had nothing else to say. The interest of the figure was not in
its meaning, but in the response of the observer. As Adams sat
there, numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have be-
come a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning. Most
took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were vacant-minded
in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would have
been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese jinricksha-
runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a lesson
even deeper. One after another brought companions there, and,
apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passion-
ately against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of
atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest saw only what he
brought. Ljke_U^great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror
and no more. The American layman had lost sight of ideals fthe
American priest 'had lost sight of faith. Both were^ more Ameri-
can than the old, half-witted soldiers wKo^Hcnoiinced the wast-
ing, on a mere grave, of money which should have been given for
drink.
330 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain of
self-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to which all
others were subservient, and which absorbed the energies of some
sixty million people to the exclusion of every other force, real or
imaginary. The power of the railway system had enormously in-
creased since 1870. Already the coal output of 160,000,000 tons
closely approached the 180,000,000 of the British Empire, and one
Kelchone's" breath at the nearness of what one had never expected
to see, the crossing of courses, and the lead of American energies.
The moment was deeply exciting to a historian, but the railway
system itself interested one less than in 1868, since it offered less
chance for future profit. Adams had been born with the railway
system; had grown up with it; had been over pretty nearly every
mile of it with curious eyes, and knew as much about it as his
neighbors; but not there could he look for a new education. In-
complete though it was, the system seemed on the whole to satisfy
the wants of society better than any other part of the social ma-
chine, and society was content with its creation, for the time, and
with itself for creating it. Nothing new was to be done or learned
there, and the world hurried on to its telephones, bicycles, and
electric trams. At past fifty, Adams solemnly and painfully learned
to ride the bicycle.
Nothing else occurred' to him as a means of new life. Nothing
else offered itself, however carefully he sought. He looked for no
change. He lingered in Washington till near July without notic-
ing a new idea. Then he went back to England to pass his summer
on the Deeside. In October he returned to Washington and there
awaited the reelection of Mr. Cleveland, which led to no deeper
thought than that of taking up some small notes that happened
to be outstanding. He had seen enough of the world to be a coward,
and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers. Even dead
men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.
CHAPTER XXII
CHICAGO (1893)
DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle and
during this last decade every one talked, and seemed
to f eel fin-de-siecle where not a breath stirred the idle
air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one
lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. For years
he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was
as unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed
that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that
resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest,
profound as the grave.
His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a
meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but
existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to
him. Of the society favorites who made the life of every dinner-
table and of the halls of Congress Tom Reed, Bourke Cockran,
Edward Wolcott he knew not one. Although Calvin Brice was
his next neighbor for six years, entertaining lavishly as no one had
ever entertained before in Washington, Adams never entered his
house. W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in hospitality, and
was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming era, but Adams
saw him as little as he saw his chief, President Cleveland, or Presi-
dent Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or Olney. One has
no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one may pick and
choose between houses, or accept hospitality without returning it.
He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was unfit for social
work, and he sank under the surface.
Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is
not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves
to pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social
332 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
offences were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than
himself; but a few houses^always remained which he could enter
without being asked, and quit without being noticed. One was
John Hay's; another was Cabot Lodge's; a third led to an intimacy
which had the singular effect of educating him in knowledge of
the very class of American politician who had done most to block
his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania had
married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman of Ohio,
thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics, and
in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron
and Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without suc-
cession, as the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both of
them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of this intimacy
had made him one of their habitual household, as he was of Hay's.
In a small society, such ties between houses become political and
social force. Without intention or consciousness, they fix one's
status in the world. Whatever one's preferences in politics might
be, one's house was bound to the Republican interest when sand-
wiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay, and Cabot Lodge,
with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all, and Cecil
Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The relation was
daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or patronage, since
Mr. Harrison, in those respects, showed little more taste than Mr.
Cleveland for the society and interests of this particular band of
followers, whose relations with the White House were sometimes
comic, but never intimate.
In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South
Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point
on St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken,
with the rest, to open the new experience. From there he went on
to Havana, and came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near
April. In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the
Exposition, and Adams went with them. Early in June, all sailed
for England together, and at last, in the middle of July, all found
CHICAGO 333
themselves in Switzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt.
On July 22 they drove across the Furka Pass and went down by
rail to Lucerne.
Months of close contact teach character, if character has inter-
est; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since
it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President Grant.
Perhaps it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood of Adam
and Eve, the primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the blood
of the cottager working against the blood of the townsman; but
whatever it was, one liked it for its simplicity. The Pennsylvania
mind, as minds go, was not complex; it reasoned little and nevef
talked; but in practical matters it was the steadiest "of all Ameri J
can types; perhaps the most efficient; certainly the safest.
Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never
been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical Penn-
sylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard, Benjamin
Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of Albert
Gallatin, indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an elabo-
rate picture, only to show that he was, if American at all, a
New Yorker, with a Calvinistic strain rather Connecticut than
Pennsylvanian. The true Pennsylvanian was a narrower type; as
narrow as the kirk; as shy of other people's narrowness as a Yankee;
as self-limited as a Puritan farmer. To him, none but Pennsyl-
yanians were white. Chinaman, negro, Dago, Italian, English-
man, Yankee all was one in the depths of Pennsylvanian con-
sciousness. The mental machine could run only on what it took
for American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's study of
President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was admir-
ably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same lines.
Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when he allied
his interests. He then became supple in action and large in motive,
whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he happened to be
right which Was, of course, whenever one agreed with him he
was the strongest American in America. As an ally he was worth
334 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
all the rest, because he understood his own class, who were always
a majority; and knew how to deal with them as no New Englander
could. If one wanted work done in Congress, one did wisely to
avoid asking a New Englander to do it. A Pennsylvanian not
only could do it, but did it willingly, practically, and intelligently.
Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron be-
lieved in an Adams or an Adams in a Cameron but they had
curiously enough, almost always worked together. The Camerons
had what the Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their
objects without much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue
of the Pennsylvania machine had never been its scrupulous purity
or sparkling professions. The machine worked by coarse means on
coarse interests; but its practical success had been the most curi-
ous subject of study in American history. When one summed up
the results of Pennsylvanian influence, one inclined to think that
Pennsylvania set up the Government in 1789; saved it in 1861;
created the American system; developed its iron and coal power;
and invented its great railways. Following up the same line, in
his studies of American character, Adams reached the result
to him altogether paradoxical that Cameron's qualities and
defects united in equal share to make him the most useful member
of the Senate.
In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable speci-
men of this American type which had so persistently suppressed
his own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron strongly influ-
enced him, but he could not see a trace of any influence which he
exercised on Cameron. Not an opinion or a view of his on any
subject was ever reflected back on him from Cameron's, mind;
not even an expression or a fact. Yet the difference in age was
trifling, and in education slight. On the other hand, Cameron
made deep impression on Adams, and in nothing so much as on
the great subject of discussion that year the question of silver.
Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing
about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana Horton;
CHICAGO 335
but inevitably, from the moment he was forced to choose sides, he
was sure to choose silver. Every political idea and personal preju-
dice he ever dallied with held him to the silver standard, and made
a barrier between him and gold. He knew well enough all that was
to be said for the gold standard as economy, but he had never in
his life taken politics for a pursuit of economy. One might have
a political or an economical policy; one could not have both at
the same time. This was heresy in the English school, but it had
always been law in the American. Equally he knew all that was to
be said on the moral side of the question, and he admitted that his
interests were, as Boston maintained, wholly on the side of gold;
but, had they been ten times as great as they were, he could not
have helped his bankers or croupiers to load the dice and pack
the cards to make sure his winning the stakes. At least he was
bound to profess disapproval or thought he was. From early
childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly with his inter-
ests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others masses
of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals. Morality
is a private and costly luxury. The morality of the silver or gold
standards was to be decided by popular vote, and the popular
vote would be decided by interests; but on which side lay the
larger interest? To him the interest was political; he thought it
probably his last chance of standing up for his eighteenth-century
principles, strict construction, limited powers, George Washington,
John Adams, and the rest. He had, in a half-hearted way, strug-
gled all his life against State Street, banks, capitalism altogether,
as he knew it in old England or new England, and he was fated
to make his last resistance behind the silver standard.
*.For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in com-
pany with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little
difference on the merits. Adams was sure to learn backwards, but
the case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsyl-
vanian, a practical politician, whom all the reformers, including
all the Adamses, had abused for a lifetime for subservience to
336 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
moneyed interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go with
the banks and corporations which had made and sustained him.
On the contrary, he stood out obstinately as the leading champion
of silver in the East. The reformers, represented by the Evening
Post and Godkin, whose personal interests lay with the gold stand-
ard, at once assumed that Senator Cameron had a personal interest
in silver, and denounced his corruption as hotly as though he had
been convicted of taking a bribe.
More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Ad-
ams. His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver;
the Evening Post 9 s and Godkin's interests were with gold, and they
frankly said so, yet they avowedly pursued their interests even into
politics; Cameron's interests had always been with the corporations,
yet he supported silver. Thus morality required that Adams should
be condemned for going against his interests; that Godkin was vir-
tuous in following his interests; and that Cameron was a scoundrel
whatever he did.
Granting that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it:
Adams or Godkin or Cameron? Until a Council or a Pope or a
Congress or the newspapers or a popular election has decided a
question of doubtful morality, individuals are apt to err, especially
when putting money in to. their own pockets; but in democracies,
the majority alone gives law. To any one who knew the relative
popularity of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a popular vote
between them seemed excessively humorous; yet the popular vote
in the end did decide against Cameron, for Godkin.
The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr.
Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his interests,
or his antipathies; but the true American, slow to grasp new and
complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover where his greater
interest lay. As usual, the. banks^taught him. In the course of fifty
years the banlcs taught one many wise lessons for which an insect
had to be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all the
lessons Adams learned from them, none compared in dramatic
CHICAGO 337
effect with that of July 22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the
morning with Senator Cameron on the top of their travelling-
carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they reached Lucerne in the
afternoon, where Adams found letters from his brothers request-
ing his immediate return to Boston because the community was
bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.
If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a
lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was
himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had
struck him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first
thought was of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a
sleepless night, but although his mind tried to wrestle with the
problem how any man could be ruined who had, months before,
paid off every dollar of debt he knew himself to owe, he gave up
that insoluble riddle in order to fall back on the larger principle
that beggary could be no more for him than it was for others who
were more valuable members of society, and, with that, he went
to sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started for Quincy
where he arrived August 7.
As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years old, the
shock of finding one's self suspended, for several months, over the
edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how
to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the
situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him, among
others, some money thousands of millions were as bank-
ruptcy the same for which he, among others, was respon-
sible and of which he knew no more than they. The humor of this
situation seemed to him so much more pointed than the terror, as
to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he had been long
strange to. As far as he could comprehend, he had nothing to lose
that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose their existence.
Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was
their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could
afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same posi-
338 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
tion, though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked
what the banks were going to do about it. To Adams the situa-
tion seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he under-
stood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much
better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing
something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his
bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit, the
cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams ac-
cepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing
to let the banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to
them. Each wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their
debts, and he could find no answer to the question which was re-
sponsible for getting the other into the situation, since lenders and
borrowers were the same interest and socially the same person.
Evidently the force was one; its operation was mechanical; its
effect must be proportional to its power; but no one knew what it
meant, and most people dismissed it as an emotion a panic
that meant nothing.
Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly
old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy,
for at last he had got hold of his world and could finish his educa-
tion, interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it were
worth finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the first time
since 1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to
happen to the world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in
the forces at work; the old machine ran far behind its duty; some-
where somehow it was bound to break down, and if it hap-
pened to break precisely over one's head, it gave the better chance
for study.
For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother
Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the
same perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old;
a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Bos-
ton conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers
CHICAGO
339
could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to
audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of
history that civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked
it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic.
Everything American, as well as most things European and
Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium
and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the ad-
vantages of ten years' study, had swept away much rubbish in
the effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he
found that no paradox compared with that of daily events. The
facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability
was greater than he calculated; the speed of acceleration passed
bounds. Among other general rules he laid down the paradox that,
in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical
outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made
note of it for study.
By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the
storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and
one so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the Exposi-
tion again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found
matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread
over chaos. Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year, educa-
tion went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell into
relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with the
problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it; and
when one sought rest at Chicago, educational game started like
rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight among thousands
of its kind before one could mark its burrow. The Exposition
itself defied philosophy. One might find fault till the last gate
closed, one could still explain nothing that needed explanation.
As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but the
inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all
more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent,
Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway
34-O THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
system thrown in, since these were all natural products in their
place; while, since Noah's Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill-
joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and
half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had
ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.
The first astonishment became greater every day. That the
Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the North-
west offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that it
should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and
even granting it were not admitting it to be a sort of industrial,
speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts artistically
induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan
could it be made to seem at home there? Was the American made
to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air of enjoying it as
though it were all his own; he felt it was good; he was proud of
it; for the most part, he acted as though he had passed his life
in landscape gardening and architectural decoration. If lie had
not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him,
as he knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth's
or Paquin's. Perhaps he could not do it again; the next time he
would want to do it himself and would show his own faults; but for
the moment he seemed to have leaped directly from Corinth and
Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York,
to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago. Critics had no
trouble in criticising the classicism, but all trading cities had al-
ways shown traders' taste, and, to the stern purist of religious
faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All trader's taste
smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her taste a look
of unity.
One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's
dome almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the
same purpose. Here was a breach of continuity a rupture m
historical sequence! Was it real, or only apparent? One's personal
universe hung on The answer, for, if the rupture was real and the
CHICAGO 341
new American world could take this sharp and conscious twist
towards ideals, one's personal friends would come in, at last, as
winners in the great American chariot-race for fame. If the people
of the Northwest actually knew what was good when they saw it,
they would some day talk about Hunt and Richardson, La Farge
and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and Stanford White
when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten.
The artists and architects who had done the work offered little
encouragement to hope it; they talked freely enough, but not in
terms that one cared to quote; and to them the Northwest refused
to look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for them-
selves; as though art, to the Western people, was a stage decora-
tion; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the archi-
tects of Paestum and Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the
Greek had said the same thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand
years ago.
Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits for
help, and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much
and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste. Some millions
of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were
seeking education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and
normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-
engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and expected to under-
stand one as little as the other. For the historian alone the Expo-
sition made a serious effort. Historical exhibits were common, but
they never went far enough; none were thoroughly worked out.
One of the best was that of the Cunard steamers, but still a student
hungry for results found himself obliged to waste a pencil and
several sheets of paper trying to calculate exactly when, according
to the given increase of power, tonnage, and speed, the growth of
the ocean steamer Would reach its limits. His figures brought him,
he tKou^t/'to^theyear I9 2 7; ^B2^1 iei L8 enerat ^ on t? s P a e before
force, space, and time shoulTmeet. The ocean steamer ran the
surest line of trianguTaHbii into the future, because it was the
34 2 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
nearest of man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because
they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number;
explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physi-
cists, and mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught least
because it had barely reached infancy, and, if its progress was to
be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would result in
infinite costless energy within a generation. One lingered long
among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history
a new phase. Men of science could never understand the ignorance
'and naivete of the 'historian,' ".who, when he came suddenly on a
new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull or did it
push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was it a
wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such questions to
which he expected answers and was astonished to get none.
Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds
which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which
they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever who
had never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces who had
never put their hands on a lever had never touched an electric
battery never talked through a telephone, and had not the
shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt
or an ampere or an erg> or any other term of measurement intro-
duced within a hundred years had no choice but to sit down on
the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of
Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what
they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed
of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society
that let them say and do it. The historical mind can think only
in historical processes, and probably this was the first time since
historians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before
a mechanical sequence. Before a metaphysical or a theological
or a political sequence, most historians had felt helpless, but the
single clue to which they had hitherto trusted was the unity of
natural force.
CHICAGO 34.3
Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If
he had known enough to state his problem, his education would
have been complete at once. Chicago asked in 1893 for the first
time the question whether the American people knew where they
were driving. Adams answered, for one, that he did not know, but
would try to find out. On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the
shadow of Richard Hunt's architecture, he decided that the Amer-
ican people probably knew no more than he did; but that they
might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in
thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards
some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could
be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first ex-
pression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.
Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell
headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the
Silver Act. The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to
prevent it, and most of the majority had little heart in the creation
of a single gold standard. The banks alone, and the dealers in
exchange, insisted upon it; the political parties divided according to
capitalistic geographical lines, Senator Cameron offering almost
the only exception; but they mixed with unusual good-temper, and
made liberal allowance for each others' actions and motives. The
struggle was rather less irritable than such struggles generally
were, and it ended like a comedy. On the evening of the final vote,
Senator Cameron came back from the Capitol with Senator Brice,
Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and Moreton Frewen, all in the
gayest of humors as though they were rid of a heavy responsibility.
Adams, too, in a bystander's spirit, felt light in mind. He had stood
up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George
Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth
Pilgrims, as long as any one would stand up with him. He had
said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the
same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself alto-
gether alone, i He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and
344 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Capitalistic society until he had become little better than a crank.
He had known for years that he must_ accept the regime, but he
had known a great many other disagreeable certainties like age,
senility, and death against which one made what* little resist-
ance one could. The matter was settled at last by the people.
For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people
had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two
forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and
mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard,
and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of
the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. All one's
friends, all one's best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, edu-
cated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capi-
talism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. Of
all forms of society or government, this was the one he liked least,
but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of
State rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were
to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic
methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to
run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern and
Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as
had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple
conditions.
There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was
question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved
no disputed principle. Once admitted that the machine must be
efficient, society might dispute in what social interest it should be
run, but in any case it must work concentration. Such great revo-
lutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in
politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which
he and his silver friends slipped across the chasm, and alighted on
the single gold standard and the capitalistic system with its
methods; the protective tariff; the corporations and trusts; the
trades-unions and socialistic paternalism which necessarily made
CHICAGO 345
their complement; the whole mechanical consolidation of force,
which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class into which
Adams was born, but created fnonopolies capable of controlling
the new energies that America adored.
Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders
of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing
remained for a historian but to ask how long and how far!
CHAPTER XXIII
SILENCE (1894-1898)
THE convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and
closed much education. While the country braced itself
up to an effort such as no one had thought within its
powers, the individual crawled as he best could, through the
wreck, and found many values of life upset. But for connecting
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to
1897, had no value in the drama of education, and might be left
out. Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890
perished in the ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been
the fortunes of Clarence King. The lesson taught whatever the
bystander chose to read in it; but to Adams it seemed singularly
full of moral, if he could but understand it. In 1871 he had thought
King's education ideal, and his personal fitness unrivalled. No
other young American approached him for the combination of
chances physical energy, social standing, mental scope and
training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively
American and irresistibly strong. His nearest rival was Alexander
Agassiz, and, as far as their friends knew, no one else could be
classed with them in the running. The result of twenty years'
effort proved that the theory of scientific education failed where
most theory fails for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who
kept himself, as he thought, quite outside of every possible fi-
nancial risk, had been caught in the cogs, and held for months
over the gulf of bankruptcy, saved only by the chance that the
whole class of millionaires were more or less bankrupt too, and the
banks were forced to let the mice escape with the rats; but, in
sum, education without capital could always be taken by the
throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped by the
knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered.
SILENCE 347
Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education was
the same. The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to
back it, was flagrant.
The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless
without money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure
to be frozen out. Education must fit the complex conditions of a
new society, always accelerating its movement, and its fitness
could be known only from success. One looked about for exam-
ples of success among the educated of one's time the men born
in the thirties, and trained to professions. Within one's immediate
acquaintance, three were typical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and
William C. Whitney; all of whom owed their free hand to marriage,
education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in 1893,
William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type.
Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print
was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the
very rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New
York might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or
sneered at them, and never showed them respect. Scarcely one
of the very rich men held any position in society by virtue of his
wealth, or could have been elected to an office, or even into a good
club. Setting aside the few, like Pierpont Morgan, whose social
position had little to do with greater or less wealth, riches were in
New York no object of envy on account of the joys they brought
in their train, and Whitney was not even one of the very rich;
yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason for it.
Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having
gratified every ambition, and swung the country almost at his
will; he had thrown away the usual objects of political ambition
like the ashes of smoked cigarettes; had turned to other amuse-
ments, satiated every taste, gorged every appetite, won every
object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had carried
his field of activity abroad, until New York no longer knew what
348 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had succeeded pre-
cisely where Clarence King had failed.
Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond rever-
sal; but one knew no better in 1894 than In 1854 what an Ameri-
can education ought to be in order to count as success. Even
granting that it counted as money, its value could not be called
general. America contained scores of men worth J&y^milliOTs_or
upwards^ whose Hves were no more worth livingjdian those of
their cooks, and to whom the task of making money equivalent
to education offered more difficulties than to Adams the task of
making education equivalent to money. Social position seemed to
have value still, while education counted for nothing. A mathe-
matician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if fortunate,
might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open market.
An administrator, organizer, manager, with
of energy and will, but no education beyond Kis special branch,
would probably be worth at least ten times as much.
Society had failed to discover what sort of education suited it
best. Wealth valued social position and classical education as
highly as either of these valued wealth, and the women still tended
to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could see he was
himself as contented as though he had been educated; while
Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory,
had failed; and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams,
had achieved phenomenal success.
Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile
use of the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and
Spanish. With these he could still make his way to any object
within his vision, and would have a decisive advantage over nine
rivals in ten. Statesman or lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest
or professor, native or foreign, he would fear none.
King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
SILENCE 349
indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King in-
duced him to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted
into the little town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society,
which King knew well, was more amusing than any other that
one had yet discovered in the whole broad world, but made no
profession of teaching anything unless it were Cuban Spanish or
the danza; and neither on his own nor on King's account did the
visitor ask any loftier study than that of the buzzards floating on
the trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or the colors of sea
and shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran Piedra; but, as
though they were still twenty years old and revolution were as
young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid, fell
on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief.
In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were always
falling on one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant political
convulsions taught least. Since the time of Rameses, revolutions
have j-aised more doubts tfian they solved, but they have some-
times the merit of changing one's point of view, and the Cuban
rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams to a
Democratic administration. He thought that President Cleve-
land could have settled the Cuban question, without war, had he
chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the Demo-
cratic Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and the
gold standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave
no choice between parties. The new American, whether con-
sciously or not, had turned his back on the nineteenth century
before he was done with it; the gold standard, the protective sys-
tem, and the lawiT'oFihass could have no other outcome, and, as
so often before, the movement, once accelerated by attempting
to impede it, had the additional, brutal consequence of crushing
equally the good and the bad that stood in its way.
The lesson was old so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex,
350 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
among the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never
been fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more
amusing for their torpor. After passing the winter with King in
the West Indies, he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellow-
stone, and found there little to study. The Geysers were an old
story; the Snake River posed no vital statistics except in its ford-
ings; even the Tetons were as calm as they were lovely; while the
wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and corners, laid no traps. In
return the party treated them with affection. Never did a band
less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the roof of the continent.
Hay loved as little as Adams did, the labor of skinning and butcher-
ing big game; he had even outgrown the sedate, middle-aged, medi-
tative joy of duck-shooting, and found the trout of the Yellowstone
too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself, who managed the party,
loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so much as a field-
mouse; Iddings the geologist was reduced to shooting only for the
table, and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the
simple life. Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wild-
ness had vanished ; one saw no possible adventures except to break
one's neck as in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent
ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociable bear.
When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on
alone to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American rail-
way systems yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning,
and no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geog-
raphy than with desperate thirst for exhausting the American
field, he set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the
Caribbean and clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least
twenty thousand miles of American land and water.
He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life tropi-
cal islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types.
Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque
than civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's sixtieth
SILENCE 351
year approached, the artist began to die^ only a certain intense
cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded to sen-
sual stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as though
art were a trotting-match. For this, one was in some degree pre-
pared, for the old man had been a stage-type since drama began;
but one felt some perplexity to account for failure on the opposite
or mechanical side, where nothing but cerebral action was needed.
Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic,
he plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would
find the surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest
he had ever approached. Even the Government volunteered un-
limited statistics, endless columns of figures, bottomless aver-
ages merely for the asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthing-
ton Ford supplied any material that curiosity could imagine for
filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and methods for applying the
plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be winning ground,
and one's averages projected themselves as laws into the future.
Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the attitude
of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in
their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they
talked like other men who knew less. The method did not result
in faith. Indeed, every increase of mass of volume and velocity
seemed to bring in new elements, and, at last, a scholar, fresh
in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious
terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came out as it
should. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up
or pull down a society. One could frame no sort of satisfactory
answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the
destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic impre-
cations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the ruin of every
society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective over-
throw of every society that seemed possible in the future; but mean-
while these societies which violated every law, moral, arithmetical,
and economical, not only propagated each other, but produced
352 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
also fresh complexities with every propagation and developed mass
with every complexity.
The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying dis-
covery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as
the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very
much concerned about this world or the future, unless it might
be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present.
Adams disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest
in future society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by
irritation at finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he
watched mankind march on, like a train of pack-horses on the
Snake River, tumbling from one morass into another, and at
short intervals, for no reason but temper, falling to butchery, like
Cain. Since 1850, massacres had become so common that so-
ciety scarcely noticed them unless they summed up hundreds of
thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost continuous, and
were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South Africa, and
possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them all
not merely unnecessary, but foolish induced by greed of the
coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still
robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and in-
evitable, but the murder seemed altogether archaic.
At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of Pteraspis,
or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral improvement
of society, he took to study of the religious press. Possibly growth
in human nature might show itself there. He found no need to
speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he preferred on
the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment;
and he very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of
religious void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a
future life, or even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an
act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.
The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many
years it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to
SILENCE 353
care for; if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the
mass of mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, sta-
tistics, travel had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair
had only confused the roads. Accidental education could go no
further, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed beyond
hope with the millions of chance images stored away without order
in the memory. One might as well try to educate a gravel-pit. The
task was futile, which disturbed a student less than the discovery
that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself ridiculous. Nothing
is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a womaiL)
rndsunrmer, i89S,TVTrs." Cabot Lodge bade him follow
her to Europe with the Senator and her two sons. The study of
history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of
women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar
enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few
women have ever been known. The woman who is known only
through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like
Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself. The American
woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw
her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eight-
eenth ; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever
be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is
pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth
century was much better company than the American man;
she was probably much better company than her grandmothers.
With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, Senator since 1893, Adams's
relations had been those of elder brother or uncle since 1871 when
Cabot Lodge had left his examination-papers on Assistant Pro-
fessor Adams's desk, and crossed the street to Christ Church in
Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself, as scholar, fellow
instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and political
reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but with
him afterwards as politician he had not much relation; and since
354 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the misfortune of becom-
ing not only a Senator but a Senator from Massachusetts a
singular social relation which Adams had known only as fatal to
friends a superstitious student, intimate with the laws of his-
torical fatality, would rather have recognized him only as an
enemy; but apart from this accident he valued Lodge highly, and
in the waste places of average humanity had been greatly de-
pendent on his house. Senators can never be approached with
safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and several su-
perior children who feel no deference for Senators as such, may
be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep
him under restraint.
Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude,
and so it chanced that in August one found one's self for the first
time at Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy.
If history had a chapter with which he thought himself familiar,
it was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor
to do with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture
system turned into green and verdurous virgin forests merely
through the medium of younger eyes and fresher minds. His Ger-
man bias must have given his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges
saw at a glance what he had thought unessential because un-Ger-
man. They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a com-
pliment which would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or
even in sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed
life in trying to persuade themselves and the public that they
breathed nothing less American than a blizzard ; but this atmos-
phere, in the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious
humor of the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an
unusual chance, even a Senator became natural, simple, interested,
cultivated, artistic, liberal genial.
Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and per-
sonal; it threw off all association with the German lecture- room.
One could not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air
SILENCE 355
of mere antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis;
but it expelled archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, with-
out seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washing-
ton with a new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and
in April returned to Mexico with the Camerons to study the
charms of pulque and Churriguerresque architecture. In May he
ran through Europe again with Hay, as far south as Ravenna.
There came the end of the passage. After thus covering once more,
in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home
in October, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and
to start the world anew.
For the old world of public men and measures since 1870,
Adams wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as
partisan or historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or
anything he wanted to save; and in this respect he reflected only
the public mind which balanced itself so exactly between the un-
popularity of both parties as to express no sympathy with either.
Even among the most powerful men of that generation he knew
none who had a good word to say for it. No period so thoroughly
ordinary had been known in American politics since Christopher
Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society; but
the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a
small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to
depend abjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged
one's self down the long vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning
heavily on one's friends, and avoiding to look at anything else.
Thus life had grown narrow with years, more and more concen-
trated on the circle of houses round La Fayette Square, which
had no direct or personal share in power except in the case of Mr.
Blaine whose tumultuous struggle for existence held him apart.
Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House and laid his
hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole nest
so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the
world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders
356 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
for London. Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had
been buried in Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life
either at home or abroad, and broke up his house on the Square.
Only the Lodges and Roosevelts remained, but even they were
at once absorbed in the interests of power. Since 1861, no such
social convulsion had occurred.
Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most strongly
the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the
man in the State Department seemed more important than the
man in the White House. Adams knew no one in the United
States fit to manage these matters in the face of a hostile Europe,
and had no candidate to propose; but he was shocked beyond all
restraints of expression to learn that the President meant to put
Senator John Sherman in the State Department in order to make
a place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himself had done noth-
ing that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long enough
to distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not
between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for
the place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was noto-
riously feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to
Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Depart-
ment. One might have shrugged one's shoulders had the President
named Mr. Hanna his Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna was a
man of force if not of experience, and selections much worse than
this had often turned out well enough; but John Sherman must
inevitably and tragically break down.
The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than
all the petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers.
Nor was the matter improved by hints that the President might
call John Hay to the Department whenever John Sherman should
retire. Indeed, had Hay been even unconsciously party to such an
SILENCE 357
intrigue, he would have put an end, once for all, to further con-
cern in public affairs on his friend's part; but even without this
last disaster, one felt that Washington had become no longer
habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary contemplation of
Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more amusing
than the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which
offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls
embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely
cause anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!
Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached
the month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years 1
dogged effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend
it to the young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had
become more and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the
Civil Law had been locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860.
Noah's dove had not searched the earth for resting-places so care-
fully, or with so little success. Any spot on land or water satis-
fies a dove who wants and finds rest; but no perch suits a dove
of sixty years old, alone and uneducated, who has lost his taste
even for olives. To this, also, the young may be driven, as educa-
tion, and the lesson fails in humor; but it may be worth knowing to
some of them that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an
elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and none at all
where he can pass a year.
Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his
years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the
task of removing its carrion, and that whjlejhe remains he has a
right to require amusement or at least education, since this costs
nothing to any one and that a world which cannot educate,
wjTljiqt amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right to exist than
he. Both views seem sound; but the world wearily objects to be
358 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
called by epithets what society always admits in practice; for no
one likes to be told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly;
and having nothing to say in its defence, it rejoins that, what-
ever license is pardonable in youth, the man of sixty who wishes
consideration had better hold his tongue. This truth also has the
defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for men of half that
age. Only the very young have the right to betray their ignorance
or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to
betray themselves.
Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed
on one point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in
others. Of all characteristics in human nature, this has been one
of the most abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long
history of human expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid
by the wise, shows that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever
existed on this. "Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he
holdeth his peace, is counted wise," and still more often, the wisest
of men, when he spoke the highest wisdom, has been counted a
fool. They agreed only on the merits of silence in others. Socrates
made remarks in its favor, which should have struck the Athenians
as new to them; but qf late the repetition had grown tiresome.
Thomas Carlyle vociferated his admiration of it. Matthew Arnold
thought it the best form of expression; and Adams thought Mat-
thew Arnold the best form of expression in his time. Algernon
Swinburne called it the most noble to the end. Alfred de Vigny's
dying wolf remarked :
"A voir ce que Ton fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse."
"When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,
Only silence is strong, all the rest is but lies."
Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have
SILENCE 359
decided to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm
that
"The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen
Than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest;"
with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The
evidence of the poets could not be more emphatic:
"Silent, while years engrave the brow!
Silent, the best are silent now!"
Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in silence
as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all philos-
ophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, had ever
been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few were believed
to have attained ignorance, which was in result the same. More
than this, in every society worth the name, the man of sixty had
been encouraged to ride this hobby the Pursuit of Ignorance
in Silence as though it- were the easiest way to get rid of him.
In America the silence was more oppressive than the ignorance;
but perhaps elsewhere the world might still hide some haunt of
f utilitarian silence where content reigned although long search
had not revealed it and so the pilgrimage began anew !
The first step led to London where John Hay was to be estab-
lished. One had seen so many American Ministers received in
London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more
about it; education could not be expected there; but there Adams
arrived, April 21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many
days, for Queen Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in
St. James's Street. True, Carl ton House Terrace, like the streets
of Rome, actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt
like Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a " bloodless
fear"; but in spring London is pleasant, and it was more cheery
than ever in May, 1897, when every one was welcoming the return
360 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
of life after the long winter since 1893. One's fortunes, or one's
friends' fortunes, were again in flood.
This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's
self the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with
family jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown.
No wrinkled Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a
wrinkled Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and
that even penitence was a sort of impertinence. He slipped away to
Paris, and set up a household at St. Germain where he taught and
learned French history for nieces who swarmed under the vener-
able cedars of the Pavilion d'Angouleme, and rode about the green
forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time to time Hay
wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the sum-
mer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel
at home in France as in other countries he had thought more home-
like. At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris be-
cause he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hays
came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a stanch
and strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to Egypt.
Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw
and what they said had as little to do with education as possible,
until one evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the
Nile from Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to
announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was
the greatest stride in education since 1865, but what did it teach?
One leant on a fragment of column in the great hall at Karnak
and watched a jackal creep down the debris of ruin. The jackal's
ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building.
What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the
sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams
had taught him that the relation between civilizations was that
of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast.
He tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went
SILENCE 361
over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor
of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied
the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justin-
ian. His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode
long enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of
thought along the great highways of exchange.
CHAPTER XXIV
INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
THE summer of the Spanish War began the Indian sum-
mer of life to one who had reached sixty years of age,
and cared only to reap in peace such harvest as these
sixty years had yielded. He had reason to be more than content
with it. Since 1864 he had felt no such sense of power and mo-
mentum, and had seen no such number of personal friends wield-
ing it. The sense of solidarity counts for much in one's content-
ment, but the sense of winning one's game counts for more; and
in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly interesting to the
last survivor of the Legation of 1861. He thought himself per-
haps the only person living who could get full enjoyment of the
drama. He carried every scene of it, in a century and a half since
the Stamp Act, quite alive in his mind all the interminable
disputes of his disputatious ancestors as far back as the year 1750
as well as his own insignificance in the Civil War, every step
in which had the object of bringing England into an American
system. For this they had written libraries of argument and re-
monstrance, and had piled war on war, losing their tempers for
life, and souring the gentle and patient Puritan nature of their
descendants, until even their private secretaries at times used
language almost intemperate; and suddenly, by pure chance, the
blessing fell on Hay. After two hundred years of stupid and greedy
blundering, which no argument and no violence affected, the peo-
ple of England learned their lesson just at the moment when Hay
would otherwise have faced a flood of the old anxieties. Hay him-
self scarcely knew how grateful he should be, for to him the change
came almost of course. He saw only the necessary stages that had
led to it, and to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still
living in the atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the
INDIAN SUMMER 363
sudden appearance of Germany as the grizzly terror which, in
twenty years effected what Adamses had tried for two hundred
in vain frightened England into America's arms seemed as
melodramatic as any plot of Napoleon the Great. He could feel
only the sense of satisfaction at seeing the diplomatic triumph of
all his family, since the breed existed, at last realized under his
own eyes for the advantage of his oldest and closest ally.
This was history, not education, yet it taught something ex-
ceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For
the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose working
itself out in history. Probably no one else on this earthly planet
not even Hay could have come out on precisely such extreme
personal satisfaction, but as he sat at Hay's table, listening to
any member of the British Cabinet, for all were alike now, discuss
the Philippines as a question of balance of power in the East, he
could sec that the family work of a hundred and fifty years fell
at once into the grand perspective of true empire-building, which
Hay's work set off with artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic
foundations looked stronger and larger in scale for the refinement
and certainty of the arcade. In the long list of famous American
Ministers in London, none could have given the work quite the
completeness, the harmony, the perfect ease of Hay.
Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of
law in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it,
for, chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal prop-
erty by inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in
the affairs of man a property which x no one else had right to
dispute; and this personal triumph left him a little cold towards
the other diplomatic results of the war. He knew that Porto Rico
must be taken, but he would have been glad to escape the Philip-
pines. Apart from too intimate an acquaintance with the value
of islands in the South Seas, he knew the West Indies well enough
to be assured that, whatever the American people might think or
say about it, they would sooner or later have to police those islands,
364 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
.not against Europe, but for Europe, and America too. Education
on the outskirts of civilized life teaches not very much, but it
taught this; and one felt no call to shoulder the load of archipela-
goes in the antipodes when one was trying painfully to pluck up
courage to face the labor of shouldering archipelagoes at home.
The country decided otherwise, and one acquiesced readily enough,
since the matter concerned only the public willingness to carry
loads; in London, the balance of power in the East came alone
into discussion; and in every point of view one had as much reason
to be gratified with the result as though one had shared in the
danger, .instead of being vigorously employed in looking on from
a great distance. After all, friends had done the work, if not one's
self, and he too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they
made a sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms
rivalling those of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many
beautiful places scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler
or more genial than Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the
Saxons, its avenues, its terraces, its deer-park, its large repose on
the Kentish hillside, and its broad outlook over what was once the
forest of Anderida. Filled with a constant stream of guests, the
house seemed to wait for the chance to show its charms to the Amer-
ican, with whose activity the whole world was resounding; and
never since the battle of Hastings could the little telegraph office
of the Kentish village have done such work. There, on a hot July 4,
1898, to an expectant group under the shady trees, came the tele-
gram announcing the destruction of the Spanish Armada, as it
might have come to Queen Elizabeth in 1588; and there, later in
the season, came the order summoning Hay to the State Depart-
ment.
Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as
he. No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries
INDIAN SUMMER 365
of State, or how little strength he had in reserve against it. Even
at Surrenden he showed none too much endurance, and he would
gladly have found a valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on
both sides was earnest, but the decided voice of the conclave was
that, though if he were a mere office-seeker he might certainly
decline promotion, if he were a member of the Government he
could not. No serious statesman could accept a favor and refuse
a service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in that case he must
resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen fascination
for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old draw-
back of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes, even
though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him, no
doubt, the service, though hard, might bring some share of profit,
but for the friends who gave this unselfish decision, all would prove
loss. For one, Adams on that subject had become a little daft.
No one in his experience had ever passed unscathed through
that malarious marsh. In his fancy, office was poison; it killed
body and soul physically and socially. Office was more pois-
onous than priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it held more
power; but the poison he complained of was not ambition; he
shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for that healthy ,
stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison was
that qf the will the distortion of sight the warping of mind
the degradation of tissue the coarsening of taste the nar-
rowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed
no office in order to wield influence. For him, influence lay about
the streets, waiting for him to stoop to it; he enjoyed more than
enough power without office; no one of his position, wealth, and
political experience, living at the centre of politics in contact with
the active party managers, could escape influence. His only ambi-
tion was to escape annoyance, and no one knew better than he
that, at sixty years of age, sensitive to physical strain, still more
sensitive to brutality, vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office
at cost of life.
366 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made pretence of
gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and
lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the lighter
for their humor, and his obedience to the President's order was the
gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark
views, too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, while
Hay had at least the honors of office, his friends would share only
the ennuis of it; but, as usual with Hay, nothing was gained by
taking such matters solemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left
their mark of military drill on every one who lived through it.
He shouldered his pack and started for home. Adams had no mind
to lose his friend without a struggle, though he had never known
such sort of struggle to avail. The chance was desperate, but he
could not afford to throw it away; so, as soon as the Surrenden
establishment broke up, on October 17, he prepared for return
home, and on November 13, none too gladly, found himself again
gazing into La Fayette Square.
He had made another false start and lost two years more of
education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics nor
society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do with
Hay's politics at home or abroad, and never affected agreement
with his views or his methods, nor did Hay care whether his friends
agreed or disagreed. They all united in trying to help each other to
get along the best way they could, and all they tried to save was
the personal relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten
had he not been helped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of
distraction, and led her husband into the habit of stopping every
afternoon to take his friend off for an hour's walk, followed by a
cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards, and a chat with any one
who called.
For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pur-
suits which were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no
right to be called pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued
INDIAN SUMMER 367
nothing, but drifted as attraction offered itself. The short session
broke up the Washington circle, so that, on March 22, Adams was
able to sail with the Lodges for Europe and to pass April in Sicily
and Rome.
With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years
had left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy
of 1860, but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe
and violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began
its study on the eye of Cyclops. For ^l^sjsc^jn^anarchy, without
a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution."
Syracuse teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not
mute, and the church of Ara Coeli seemed more and more to
draw all the threads of thought to a centre, for every new jour-
ney led back to its steps Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi, Mycenae,
Constantinople, Syracuse all lying on the road to the Capitol.
What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not
yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral; and New
York sent most of all, for, in forty years^America had made so
vast a stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a
distant horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic
of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincoln
..as, they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the
Civil War only by school history, as they knew the story of Crom-
well or Cicero, and were as familiar with political assassination
as though they had lived under Nero." The climax of empire
could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla were
a President or McKinley a Consul.
Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple
and obvious in no way unpleasant truth; therefore one sat
silent as ever on the Capitol ; but, by way of completing the lesson,
the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St.
Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most satis-
factory or sufficient ever offered; worth fully forty years'
more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even
368 THE EDUCATION op HENRY ADAMS
St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering
effect of all these fresh cross-lights on the old Assistant Professor
of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he had
taught then and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn
five-and-twenty years afterwards between the twelfth century
of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College,
weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasion-
ally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his life-blood
for the sublime truths of Sac and Soc :
HIC JACET
HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
DOCTOR BARBARICUS
HENRICUS ADAMS
ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
PRIMO EXPLICUIT
SOCNAM
The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as
satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning
of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have
scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality;
but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir
Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators
of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing,
and that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's
scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other
path to a profession.
The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any other
8ingle"thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more conti-
guity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own.
St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved
the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to
Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his
life had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer
INDIAN SUMMER 369
mattered. He passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with
the last at Surrenden; but the solitude did what the society did not
it forced and drove Jiim into the study of his ignorance in
sileftceTJHere"af last he entered^tEe"practice of his final profession.
^Hunted by ennui, he could no longer escape, and, by way of a
summer school, he began a methodical survey a triangulation
of the twelfth century. The pursuit had a singular French
charm which France had long lost a calmness, lucidity, sim-
plicity of expression, vigor of action, complexity of local color,
that made Paris flat. In the long summer days one found a sort
of saturated green pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest
in the little twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassum-
ing as their own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round
arches; but churches were many and summer was short, so that
he was at last driven back to the quays and photographs. For
weeks he lived in silence.
His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new
value. Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since
1850 John La Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry
Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the question how much
he owed to La Farge could be answered only by admitting that he
had no standard to measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge alone
owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the common-
places of American uniformity, and in the process had vastly per-
plexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The American
mind the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western likes
to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that
it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional
Analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional
expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality. The
most dTsconcerting trait of John La Farge was his reversal of the
process. His approach was quiet and indirect; he moved round an
object, and never separated it from its surroundings; he prided
370 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
tymself on faithfulness to tradition and convention; he was never
abrupt and abhorred dispute. His manners and attitude towards
the universe were the same, whether tossing in the middle of the
Pacific Ocean sketching the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the
blast of sea-sickness, or drinking the cka-no-yu in the formal rites
of Japan, or sipping his cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of
Samoan chiefs, or reflecting under the sacred bo-tree at Anaradj-
pura.
One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
'contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but
always there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it
flowed, for even a contradiction was to him only a shade of differ-
ence, a complementary color, about which no intelligent artist
would dispute. Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams, you
reason too much!" was one of his standing reproaches even in the
mild discussion of rice and mangoes in the warm night of Tahiti
dinners. He should have blamed Adams for being born in Boston.
The mind resorts to reason for want of training, and Adams had
never met a perfectly trained mind.
To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone a
shade a nuance and the flner the tone, the truer the eccen-
tricity. Of course all artists hold more or less the same point of
view in their art, but few carry it into daily life, and often the
contrast is excessive between their art and their talk. One eve-
ning Humphreys Johnston, who was devoted to La Farge, asked
him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge was ill more ill than
usual even for him but he admired and liked Whistler, and
insisted on going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to over-
hear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear that
of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At that moment the Boer
War was raging, and, as every one knows, on that subject Whistler
INDIAN SUMMER . 371
raged worse than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed against
England witty, declamatory, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and
noisy; but in substance what he said was not merely common-
place it was true! That is to say, his hearers, including Adams
and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed with it all, and mostly
as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent, and this difference
of expression was a difference of art. Whistler in his art carried the
sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point reached by La
Farge, or even attempted ; but in talk he showed, above or below
his color-instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real
eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed.
This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his paint-
ing, La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative
value of La Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams
was too ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible
more ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to
the twelfth century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt
at home, but felt a sort of ownership. No other American had a
right there, unless he too were a member of the Church and
worked in glass. Adams himself was an interloper, but long habit
led La Farge to resign himself to Adams as one who meant well,
though deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, though near sixty
years old before he knew anything either of glass or of Chartres,
asked no better than to learn, and only La Farge could help him,
for he knew enough at least to see that La Farge alone could use
glass like a thirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been
dead for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge
felt the early glass rather as a document than as a historical emo-
tion, and in hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and
Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant to hold
their own against a color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation
La Farge's mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions
of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In
glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his per-
372 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
sonal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen.
He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.
Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education
made a step backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health
became more and more alarming, and Adams was glad to get him
safely back to New York, January 15, 1900, while he himself
went at once to Washington to find out what had become of
Hay. Nothing good could be hoped, for Hay's troubles had be-
gun, and were quite as great as he had foreseen. Adams saw as lit-
tle encouragement as Hay himself did, though he dared not say
so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness in
supporting him, and the loyalty of his party friends; but all this
worry on Hay's account fretted him not nearly so much as the
Boer War did on his own. Here was a problem in his political
education that passed all experience since the Treason winter of
1860-61! Much to his astonishment, very few Americans seemed
to share his point of view; their hostility to England seemed mere
temper; but to Adams the war became almost a personal outrage.
He had been taught from childhood, even in England, that his
forbears and their associates in 1776 had settled, once for all, the
liberties of the British free colonies, and he very strongly objected
to being thrown on the defensive again, and forced to sit down, a
hundred and fifty years after John Adams had begun the task, to
prove, by appeal to law and fact, that George Washington was
not a felon, whatever might be the case with George III. For rea-
sons still more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain
question of the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even
further, and avow the opinion that if at any time England should
take towards Canada the position she took towards her Boer colo-
nies, the United States would be bound, by their record, to inter-
pose, and to insist on the application of the principles of 1776.
To him the attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed
exceedingly un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.
INDIAN SUMMER 373
Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue, and
to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could
never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theo-
retical objections which were every day fretting him in practical
forms. Hay's chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck
should turn, and to him the only object was time; but as political
education the point seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shut-
ting his eyes or denying an evident fact. Practical politics con-
sists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different
and often contradictory things, In this case, the contradiction
seemed crude. - >
With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram
Hewitt, Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden men who
played the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a
rule^'muclf better tKan .the professionals, but whose aims were
considerably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt
no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work. In return, the
professionals felt no great love for them, and set them aside when
they could. Only their control of money made them inevitable,
and even this did not always carry their points. The story of
Abrani Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman series, and
that of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside the one; Pres-
ident Harrison set aside the other. "There is no politics in it,"
was his comment on Hay's appointment to office. Hay held a
different opinion and turned to McKinley whose judgment of men
was finer than common in Presidents. Mr. McKinley brought to
the problem of American government a solution which lay very far
outside of Henry Adams's education, but which seemed to be at
least practical and American. He undertook to pool interests in
v a general trust into which every interest should be taken, more or
less at its own valuation, and whose mass should, under his man-
agement, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results.
How much they cost was another matter; if the public is ever
374 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
driven to its last resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the
result will probably cost more^
Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one
of whom was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest
and his task hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined
by simply paying their price; but abroad whatever helped on one
side, hurt him on another. Hay thought England must be brought
first into the combine; but at that time Germany, Russia, and
France were all combining against England, and the Boer War
helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally, abroad or at home,
except Pauncefote, and Adams always maintained that Paunce-
fote alone pulled him through.
Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more unman-
ageable, even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was less
the fault of the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of peace,
in any normal state of things," said Hay, "ought to be ratified
with unanimity in twenty-four hours. They wasted six weeks in
wrangling over this one, and ratified it with one vote to spare.
We have five or six matters now demanding settlement. I can
settle them all, honorably and advantageously to our own side;
and I am assured by leading men in the Senate that not one of
these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the Senate. I should have
a majority in every case, but a malcontent third would certainly
dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the original
mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of our politics.
You must understand, it is not merely my solution the Senate
will reject. They will reject, for instance, any treaty, whatever,
on any subject, with England. I doubt if they would accept any
treaty of consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrant
third would be differently composed, but it would be on hand.
So that the jeal duties of a Secretary of State seem to be threes
to fight claims upon us by other States; to press more or less frau-
INDIAN SUMMER 375
dulent^claims of pur_own citizens upon other countries^ f
offices for the friends of Senators when there are none. Is it worth
while for me to keep up this useless labor?"
To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it in
a dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred years
before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be humorous.
The intrigue was too open to be interesting. The interference of
the German and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with
the press and the Senate was innocently undisguised. The charm-
ing Russian Minister, Count Cassini, the ideal of diplomatic man-
ners and training, let few days pass without appealing through
the press to the public against the government. The German
Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously did the same thing, and
of course every whisper of theirs was brought instantly to the
Department. These three forces, acting with the regular opposi-
tion and the natural obstructionists, could always stop action in
the Senate. The fathers had intended to neutralize the energy of
government and had succeeded, but their machine was never
meant to do the work of a twenty-million horse-power society in
the twentieth century, where much work needed to be quickly and
efficiently done. The only defence of the system was that, as
Government did nothing well, it had best do nothing; but the
Government, in truth, did perfectly well all it was given to do;
and even if the charge were true, it applied equally to human
society altogether, if one chose to treat mankind from that point
of view. As a matter of mechanics, so much work must be done;
bad machinery merely added to friction.
Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
treated the world as something to be taken in block without pull-
ing it to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all: he laughed
and accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would have
gladly lived his entire life over again exactly as it happened. In
376 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
the whole New York school, one met a similar dash of humor
and cynicism more or less pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even
the gayest of tempers succumbs at last to constant friction. The
old friend was rapidly fading. The habit remained, but the easy
intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual humor, the equality of
indifference, were sinking into the routine of office; the mind lin-
gered in the Department; the thought failed to react; the wit and
humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and the irritations
multiplied. To a hfcad of bureau, the result seemed ennobling.
Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that
these political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and
twentieth centuries should be correlated in some relation of move-
ment that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in
the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one
knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond
the schoolboy s = If Kepler and Newton could take liberties
2
with the sun and moon, an obscure person in a remote wilderness
like La Fayette Square could take liberties with Congress, and
venture to multiply half its attraction into the square of its time.
He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction
at any given time. A historical formula that should satisfy the
conditions of the stellar universe weighed heavily on his mind;
but a trifling matter like this was one in which he could look for
no help from anybody he could look only for derision at best.
All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as futile
and almost immoral certainly hostile to sound historical sys-
tem. Adams tried it only because of its hostility to all that he had
taught for history, since he started afresh from the new point that,
whatever was right, all he had ever taught was wrong. He had
pursued ignorance thus far with success, and had swept his mind
clear of knowledge. In beginning again, from the starting-point
INDIAN SUMMER 377
of Sir Isaac Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher.
Few men in Washington cared to overstep the school conventions,
and the most distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too
sound a mathematician to treat such a scheme seriously. The
greatest of Americans, judged by his rank in science, Willard
Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams never enjoyed a
chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most distinguished
was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more accessible, to
whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever he
wanted an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley lis-
tened with outward patience to his disputatious questionings; but
he too nourished a scientific passion for doubt, and sentimental
attachment for its avowal. He had the physicist's heinous fault
of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense per-
ception. Like so many other great observers, Langley was not
a mathematician, and like most physicists, he believed in physics.
Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which
consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble
problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past
them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as
though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respect-
ability. He generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to
affirm; and early put into Adams's hands the " Concepts of
Modern Science," a volume by Judge Stallo, which had been
treated for a dozen years by the schools with a conspiracy of si-
lence such as inevitably meets every revolutionary work that up-
sets the stock and machinery of instruction. Adams read and failed
to understand; then he asked questions and failed to get answers.
Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be
as ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant
nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough,
or was too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never to di-
rection or progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it needed
378 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation
Everything must be made to move together; one must seek nevt
worlds to measure; and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more
and found himself on May 12 settled in rooms at the very door o:
the Trocadero.
CHAPTER XXV
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowl-
edge, and helpless to find it. He would have liked to
know how much of it could have been grasped by the best-informed
man in the world. While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley
came by, and showed it to him. At Langley' s behest, the Exhibi-
tion dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin,
for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams
might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky
Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one
might not have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years
before; but though one should have known the "Advancement of
Science" as well as one knew the " Comedy of Errors," the liter-
ary knowledge counted for nothing until some teacher should show
how to apply it. Bacon took a vast deal of trouble in teaching
King James I and his subjects, American or other, towards the
year 1620, that true science was the development or economy of
forces; yet an elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula
nor the forces; or even so much as to say to himself that his his-
torical business in the Exposition concerned only the economies
or developments of force since 1893, when he began the study at
Chicago.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of igno-
rance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked
at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art
Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of
1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with
profound attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. Lang-
ley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the
380 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force,
and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art ex-
hibit. Equally, he ignored almost the whole industrial exhibit.
He led his pupil directly to the forces. His chief interest was in
new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams
the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor, and of
the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a
hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the electric
tram which was only ten years older; and threatening to become
as terrible as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost
exactly Adams's own age.
Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and ex-
plained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind,
even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable
volume, but which, as far as he knew, mightjspout less or more,
at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it; To him, the dynamo
itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the
heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house
carefully kept out ojLsight; but to Adams the dynamo became a
symbol of infinity .^As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of
machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force,
much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself
seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or
daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-
length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring
scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth
further for respect of power while it would not wake the baby
lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to
it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before
silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate
energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the
most expressive.
Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most fa-
miliar of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN 381
occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines
and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to
abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could
he discover between the steam and the electric current than be-
tween the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchange-
able if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in elec-
tricity as in faith. Langley could not help him. Indeed, Langley
seemed to be worried by the same trouble, for he constantly re-
peated that the new forces were anarchical, and especially that
he was not responsible for the new rays, that were little short of
parricidal in their wicked spirit towards science. His own rays,
with which he had doubled the solar spectrum, were altogether
harmless and beneficent; but Radium denied its God or, what
was to Langley the same thing, denied the truths of his Science.
The force was wholly new.
A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as
Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and
mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of
Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He
wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he
would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he
hugged the dynamo; while he lost his arithmetic in trying to figure
out the equation between the discoveries and the economies of
force. The economies, like the discoveries, were absolute, super-
sensual, occult; incapable of expression in horse-power. What
mathematical equivalent could he suggest as the value of a Branly
coherer? Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had some scale of
measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a thermometer
adequate to the purpose; but X-rays had played no part whatever
in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only as a
fiction of thought. In these seven years man had translated himself
into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement
with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he
could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements
382 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his in-
struments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known
ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything,
even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused
physics stark mad in metaphysics.
Historians undertake to arrange sequences, called stories, or
histories assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect.
These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have
been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so
much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, his-
torians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never
supposed themselves required to know what they were talking
about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he
meant. He had even published a dozen volumes of American his-
tory for no other purpose than to satisfy himself whether, by the
severest process of stating, with the least possible comment, such
facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorously consequent,
he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of human
movement,. The result had satisfied him as little as at Harvard
College. < Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite
different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared little
about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed
to Kim quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest;
but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach
it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew.
Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the
sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere se-
quence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was
chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force ;/and thus it hap-
pened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found fiimself lying in the
Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical
neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.
Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person with-
out other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900 was
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN 383
not the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo had
broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood
the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to
the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up
the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which
he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a
revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were
what, in terms of mediaeval science, were called immediate modes
of the divine substance.
The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly
if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this
common value could have no measure but that of their attraction
on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt; as
convertible, reversible, interchangeable attractions on thought.
He made up his mind to venture it; he would risk translating rays
into faith. Such a reversible process would vastly amuse a chemist,
but the chemist could not deny that he, or some of his fellow
physicists, could feel the force of both. When Adams was a boy in
Boston, the best chemist in the place had probably never heard
of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as
idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or automobiles or ra-
dium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all, though the
rays were unborn and the women were dead.
Here opened another totally new education, which promised to
be by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which
he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided
two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attrac-
tion. They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, sup-
posing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love.
The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be
as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever
had value as force at most as sentiment. No American had
ever been truly afraid of either.
This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American his-
384 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
torian. j^he Wpmaahad once been supreme; in Justice she still
seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was
she unknown in America ? For evidently America was ashamed of
her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not
have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a
true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-maga-
zine-made American female had not a feature that would have
been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often
humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that
sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art
nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew
that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental god-
desses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because
of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction
the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed
was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many
schools of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening
lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin
literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante in-
voked the Virgin :
"Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas."
The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools :
"Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua disianza vuol volar senz' all."
All this was to American thought as though it had never existed.
The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of
the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before
this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself help-
less; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were
a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres,
as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN 385
eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of
four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction
over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos
ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the Ameri-
can mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an
American Venus would never dare exist.
The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth
century seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost
violently to study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys
were as useless as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos.
The idea survived only as art. There one turned as naturally as
though the artist were himself a woman. Adams began to ponder,
asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had
ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always done;
but he could thinLonly of Walt Whitman ;JSret Harte, as far as
the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters,
for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment, never
for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias an un-
feminine horror. American art, like the American language and
American education, was as far as possible sexles?. Society re-*
garded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the his-
torian readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the moment,
did not concern one who was studying the relations of unmoral
force. He cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until he could
measure its energy.
Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit,
and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's
General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor.
St. Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual
interminable last touches, and listening to the usual contradic-
tory suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the American artists
who gave to American art whatever life it breathed in the seven-
ties, St. Gaudens was perhaps the most sympathetic, but cer-
tainly the most inarticulate. General Grant or Don Cameron
386 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric than he. All the others
the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford White were
exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss or dilate on an
emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the
forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the
despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of
his world. He required no incense; he was no egoist; his simpli-
city of thought was excessive; he could not imitate, or give any
form but his own to the creations of his hand. No one felt more
strongly than he the strength of other men, but the idea that they
could affect him never stirred an image in his mind.
This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low. For
such a temper, Adams was not the best companion, since his own
gaiety was not folle; but he risked going now and then to the
studio on Mont Parnasse to draw him out for a stroll in the Bois
de Boulogne, or dinner as pleased his moods, and in return St.
Gaudens sometimes let Adams go about in his company.
Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of
Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found them-
selves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did
it dawn on Adams's mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on
that spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great
men before great monuments express great truths, provided they
are not taken too solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the
supreme phrase of his idol Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals :
"I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of
superstition." Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbon had
never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one
would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little historian,
on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade
his readers perhaps himself that he was darting a contemp-
tuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact the
respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always
feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one felt
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN 387
also the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789
religious monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark
sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had heard
a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no more fresh and cer-
tainly less simple. Without malice, one might find it more instruc-
tive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one brings,
and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution.
Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens
had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much
more than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their
unity; their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their deco-
rative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the
force that created it all the Virgin, the Woman by whose
genius "the stately monuments of superstition" were built,
through which she was expressed. He would have seen more mean-
ing in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same
thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon
the artist.
Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500;
he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an
image of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis
XL In mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by chance
into the twentieth century, and forgotten where it came from.
He writhed and cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did at
his own, but in the opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of
Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was
a quintessence of Boston, devoured by curiosity to think like
Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from birth, and Adams's
instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but half of a
nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of Amiens
they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them one;
but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a chan-
nel of force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of
taste.
388 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the
horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monu-
ment. Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so
American that, for at least forty years, Adams had never realized
that any other could be in sound taste. How many years had he
taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were
driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895
had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not every-
where even so. At Chartres perhaps at Lourdes possibly
at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphro-
dite of Praxiteles but otherwise one must look for force to the
goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in
the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly
less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew
Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses
as power only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty,
purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway
train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly com-
plained that the power embodied in a railway train could never
be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the
Virgin, build Chartres.
Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
energies acted as interchangeable forces on man, and by action
on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of
science measured force in any other way. After once admitting
that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points,
no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his
convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable,
that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a
compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might
prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their
value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest
force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities
to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or super-
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN 389
natural, had ever done; the historian^J^jn^
track ofjhe energy; to find w&ereTt came from and where jt went
to pts^complex source and shifting cHannels; its values, equiva-
lents, conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than ra-
dium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed
more perplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew noth-
ing about any of them, but as a mathematical problem of influ-
ence on human progress, though all were occult, all reacted on his
mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgin easiest to handle.
The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last
into the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes,
hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one
stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student
of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could one force one's
self into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed
at a score of entrances more promising and more popular. Thus
far, no path had led anywhere, unless perhaps to an exceedingly
modest living. Forty-five years of study had proved to be quite
futile for the pursuit of power; one controlled no more force in
1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force controlled by
society had enormously increased. The secret of education still
hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled over it
as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost
more necessary than the legs ; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man's
dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for
itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over
and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never
arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist
knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths
and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then
it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force.
The result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out
than on what is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought,
than on their play or variety. Compelled once more toleanlieavily
390 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
on this support, Adams covered more thousands of pages with
figures as formal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking
out, altering, burning, experimenting, until the year had expired,
the Exposition had long been closed, and winter drawing to its
end, before he sailed from Cherbourg, on January 19, 1901, for
home.
CHAPTER XXVI
TWILIGHT (1901)
WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and
submitted meekly to hearing itself decried as vain,
fluttered through the Paris Exposition, jogging the
futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and Besnard, the world that
thought itself serious, and showed other infallible marks of com-
ing mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at Peking and
elsewhere such as startled even itself. Qf all branches of educa-
tion, the science of gauging people and events by their relative
importance defies study most insolently. For three or four gen-
erations, society has united in withering with contempt and op-
probrium the shameless futility of Mme. de Pompadour and Mme.
du Barry; yet, if one bid at an auction for some object that had
been approved by the taste of either lady, one quickly found that
it were better to buy half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria
Theresas, or all the philosophy and science of their time, than to
bid for a cane-bottomed chair that either of these two ladies had
adorned. The same thing might be said, in a different sense, of
Voltaire; while, as every one knows, the money-value of any
hand-stroke of Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out
of all proportion to the importance of the men. Society seemed to
delight in talking with solemn conviction about serious values,
and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most futile.
The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle
for the control of China, which, in his view, must decide the con-
trol of the world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China was
chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese
porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than uni-
versal war.
39 2 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama
on future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew
no more about it than though he were the best-informed states-
man in Europe. Like them all, he took for granted that the Lega-
tions were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone championed
China's "administrative entity," would be massacred too, since he
must henceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany
dismembered China, and shut up America at home. Nine states-
men out of ten, in Europe, accepted this result in advance, seeing
no way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and laughed at Hay for
his helplessness.
When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked
on, as incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since,
on that branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose.
Nothing so meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy.
On returning to Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most
of the world as astonished as himself, but less stupid than usual.
For a moment, indeed, the world had been struck dumb at seeing
Hay put Europe aside and set the Washington Government at the
head of civilization so quietly that civilization submitted, by mere
instinct of docility, to receive and obey his orders; but, after the
first shock of silence, society felt the force of the stroke through
its fineness, and burst into almost tumultuous applause. In-
stantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century, with all its pain-
ful scuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the American blushed
to be told of his submissions in the past. History broke in halves.
Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of his
own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh
life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic, and de-
pression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles nested at
home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's diplomatic
court had become the largest in the world, and the diplomatic
TWILIGHT 393
relations required far more work than ever before, while the staff
of the Department was little more efficient, and the friction in the
Senate had become coagulated. Hay took to studying the " Diary"
of John Quincy Adams eighty years before, and calculated that
the resistance had increased about ten times, as measured by
waste of days and increase of effort, although Secretary of State
J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly treated. Hay cheer-
fully noted that it was killing him, and proved it, for the effort of
the afternoon walk became sometimes painful.
For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's un-
ruly team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole
load and turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and
Holleben helped the Senate to make jvhat trouble they could,
without serious offence, and the Irish, after the genial Celtic nature,
obstructed even themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks to their
sympathetic qualities, never made lasting enmities; but the Ger-
mans seemed in a fair way to rouse ill-will and even ugly temper
in the spirit of politics, which was by no means a part of Hay's
plans. He had as much as he could do to overcome domestic fric-
tion, and felt no wish to alienate foreign powers. Yet so much
could be said in favor of the foreigners that they commonly knew
why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive. Cassini had
for years pursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of his own,
never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief as with Hay;
he made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious objects ; but Sena-
tors could seldom give a reason for obstruction. In every hundred
men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, and try to invent
reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no worse than
the board of a university; but incorporators as a rule have not made
this class of men dictators on purpose to prevent action. In the
Senate, a single vote commonly stopped legislation, or, in commit-
tee, stifled discussion.
Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations, and
closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant
394 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience and bar-
gaining in executive patronage, if indeed it could be overcome at
all. The price actually paid was not very great except in the physi-
cal exhaustion of Hay and Pauncefote, Root and McKinley. No
serious bargaining of equivalents could be attempted; Senators
would not sacrifice five dollars in their own States to gain five
hundred thousand in another; but whenever a foreign country was
willing to surrender an advantage without an equivalent, Hay had
a chance to offer the Senate a treaty. In all such cases the price
paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the Senate, and amounted
to nothing very serious except in waste of time and wear of strength.
"Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed Hay; "the Major will have
promised all the consulates in the service; the Senators will all
come to me and refuse to believe me dis-consulate; I shall see all
my treaties slaughtered, one by one, by the thirty-four per cent
of kickers and strikers; the only mitigation I can foresee is being
sick a good part of the time; I am nearing my grand climacteric,
and the great culbute is approaching."
He was thinking of his friend Elaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight the solitary
picturesque and tragic element in politics incidentally requir-
ing character-studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Cal-
houn and Webster and Sumner, with Sir Forcible Peebles like
James M. Mason and stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling.
The Senate took the place of Shakespeare, and offered real
Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs, and Malvolios
endless varieties of human nature nowhere else to be studied,
and none the less amusing because they killed, or because they
were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is so gay and hor-
rid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely, but
what he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the
vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly complained that it
had made him a bore of all things the most senatorial, and to
TWILIGHT 395
him the most obnoxious. The old friend was lost, and only the
teacher remained, driven to madness by the complexities and
multiplicities of his new world.
To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately seek-
ing education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great
value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the prac-
tical interest and the practical man were such as looked forward
to the next election, or perhaps, in corporations, five or ten years.
Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could be named who were
known to have looked a dozen years ahead j while any historian
who means to keep his alignment with past and future must cover
a horizon of two generations at least. If he seeks to align him-
self with the future, he must assume a condition of some sort for
a world fifty years beyond his own. Every historian sometimes
unconsciously, but always inevitably must have put to him-
self the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn system
last ? He can never give himself less than one generation to show
the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to triangulate
from the widest possible base to the furthest point he thinks he can
see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon.
To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right
if the question of right or wrong enters at all into the matter the
historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in his own pro-
fession few companions offer help, and his walk soon becomes soli-
tary, leading further and further into a wilderness where twilight
is short and the shadows are dense. Already Hay literally stag-
gered in his tracks for weariness. More worn than he, Clarence
King dropped. One day in the spring he stopped an hour in Wash-
ington to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling how his doc-
tors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs. All three friends
knew that they were nearing the end, and that if it were not the
one it would be the other; but the affectation of readiness for
death is a. stage role, and stoicism is a stupid resource, though
396 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
the only one. Non dolet, Paete ! One is ashamed of it even in the
acting.
The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that a
share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disap-
peared from their lives; but Hay had still his family and ambi-
tion, while Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly,
wearily, his eyes rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across
the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big or small,
except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point
that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly curious
to see some light at the end of the passage, as though thirty years
were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's arms at the
door of the last and only log cabin left in life. Time had become
terribly short, and the sense of knowing so little when others knew
so much, crushed out hope.
He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and
oldest toy he knew was the child's magnet, with which he had
played since babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He covered
his desk with magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by
compass. Then he read all the books he could find, and tried in
vain to makes his lines of force agree with theirs. The books
confounded him. He could not credit his own understanding.
Here was literally the most concrete fact in nature, next to gravi-
tation which it defied; a force which must have radiated lines of
energy without stop, since time began, if not longer, and which
might probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
earth, since no one knew why or how or what it radiated
or even whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known
of all natural forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have sug-
gested no idea to any one until some mariner bethought himself
that it might serve for a pointer. Another thousand years passed
when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a pump,
TWILIGHT 397
supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity, still with-
out knowing how it worked or what it was. For a historian,
the story of Faraday's experiments and the invention of the
dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human ignorance
and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as his mind
refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some one, some-
where, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could but find
the book although he had been forced to admit the same help-
lessness in the face of gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors;
and he could imagine no reason why society should treat radium
as revolutionary in science when every infant, for ages past, had
seen the magnet doing what radium did; for surely the kind of
radiation mattered nothing compared with the energy that ra-
diated and the matter supplied for radiation. He dared not ven-
ture into the complexities of chemistry, or microbes, so long as this
child's toy offered complexities that befogged his mind beyond
X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless variety of pumps
endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He wanted to ask
Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of radium,
and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a magnet.
He figured the human mind itself as another radiating matter
through which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.
In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the
forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in
its new relation staggered his new education by its evidence of
growing complexity, and multiplicity, and even contradiction, in
life. He could not escape it; politics or science, the lesson was the
same, and at every step it blocked his path whichever way he
turned. He found it in politics; he ran against it in science; he
struck it in everyday life, as though he were still Adam in the Gar-
den of Eden between God who was unity, and Satan who was
complexity, witK no means of deciding which was truth. The
problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the
398 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Senate as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and
Adams.
All one's life, one iiad struggled for unity, and unity had always
won. The National Government and the national unity had over-
come every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were
triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and the
momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction.
One had in vain bowed one's neck to railways, banks, corporations,
trusts, and even to the popular will as far as one could under-
stand it or even further; the multiplicity of unity had steadily
increased, was increasing, and threatened to increase beyond
reason. He had surrendered all his favorite prejudices, and lore-
sworn even the forms of criticism except for his pet amusement,
the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant necessary to healthy
life; he had accepted uniformity and Pteraspis and ice age and
tramways and telephones; and now just when he was ready to
hang the crowning garland on the brow of a completed education
science itself warned him to begin it again from the beginning.
Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that
once, a full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing
a confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell,
and that it might be Worth looking at if only to steady his vision.
He read it again, and thought it better than he could do at sixty-
three; but elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts
grown larger, and became curious to know what had been said
about them since 1870. The Geological Survey supplied stacks of
volumes, and reading for steady months; while, the longer he
read, the more he wondered, pondered, doubted what his delight-
ful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have said about it.
Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities,
and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars
resolve themselves into multiples; yet the child will always
TWILIGHT 399
see but one. Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted
towards unity or multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would
depend on the age of the man who drifted.
Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid
fish, the Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had
sported when geological life was young; as though they had all
remained together in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow
Castle, and repeat "how charming is divine philosophy!" He felt
almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of
Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and
far back into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis
as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for
him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of known organic life.
A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the liveliest
amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the uniformitarian alive,
under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for all the ganoid
fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to hazard
even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection by
Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know
no more about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing;
but natural selection that did not select evolution finished
before it began minute changes that refused to change any-
thing during the whole geological record survival of the highest
order in a fauna which had no origin uniformity under condi-
tions which had disturbed everything else in creation to an
honest-meaning though ignorant student who needed to prove
Natural Selection and not assume it, such sequence brought no
peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused evo-
lution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by nat-
ural selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions,
converted itself info thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove
to him that it had selected neither new form nor new force,
but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be
4.00 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
increased in volume or raised in intensity only by help of outside
force. To him, the ganoid was a huge perplexity, none the less
because neither he nor the ganoid troubled Darwinians, but the
more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism seemed to sur-
vive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of evolu-
tion had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox.
Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own
lines quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up again.
A little more, and he would be driven back on the old independence
of species.
What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to
them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought
and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867,
the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily
the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of
unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe,
where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning,
dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with
side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be
proved. The active geologists had mostly become specialists deal-
ing with complexities far too technical for an amateur, but the
old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as they had
served when new.
So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of
Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into half-
a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern
hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that
the glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be re-
ferred to a horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly and
wildly sank, though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an
epoch-making work, showing that continents were anchored like
crystals, and only oceans rose and sank. LyelPs genial uniform-
ity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken its place, though,
TWILIGHT 401
in the interval, granite had grown young, nothing had been ex-
plained, and a bewildering system of huge overthrusts had up-
set geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even to discuss
theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that prog-
ress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.
Adarns had no more to do with the correctness of the science
than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness
in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him
to dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history
of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had
no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to record
in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ig-
norance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution
survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet the evolu-
tionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up courage to
rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin forbidding them
to ask more than twenty million years for their experiments. No
doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this last and
utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical Reli-
gion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had
protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geo-
logical record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus
under their breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignora-
bimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.
Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was be-
coming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at
times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured
at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, super-
sensual, electrolytic 'who knew what? defying science, if
not denying known law; and the wisest of men could but imi-
tate the Church, and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the
anarchy again. Historians have got into far too much trouble
by following schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their
synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the process in science*
402 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
For human purposes a point must always be soon reached where
larger synthesis is suicide.
Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that
the change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing.
Any student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of
his thought, should delight in turning about and trying the oppo-
site motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even to a
tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms,
cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every
schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never saved him
from whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay and Adams
could neither of them escape floundering through the corridors of
chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but they could at
least float with the stream if they only knew which way the
current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with the
Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by side
with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged
and unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it
serve ? A seeker of truth or illusion would be none the less
restless, though a shark!
CHAPTER XXVII
TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more
and more futile as the store of years grew less; for the world
contains no other spot than Paris where education can be
pursued from every side. Even more vigorously than in the twelfth
century, Paris taught in the twentieth, with no other school ap-
proaching it for variety of direction and energy of mind. Of the
teaching in detail, a man who knew only what accident had taught
him in the nineteenth century, could know next to nothing, since
science had got quite beyond his horizon, and mathematics had
become the only necessary language of thought; but one could
play with the toys of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons
of painting, operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architec-
ture, theology and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about
with Joe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry,
or studying "Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the
charm of youth and the Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite
young wife. Paris remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress
of herself though China fell. Scores of artists sculptors and
painters, poets and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, de-
signers in stuffs and furniture hundreds of chemists, physicists,
even philosophers, philologists, physicians, and historians were
at work, a thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass
and originality of their product would have swamped any pre-
vious age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the effect was
one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the
chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front of
the movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall
behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.
The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
404 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-
faced student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse
or Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in
the morning in a beer-garden even after four hours of Mounet
Sully at the Theatre Frangais. In those branches, education might
be called closed. Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything
worth knowing to a man who, holding open the door into the next
world, regarded himself as merely looking round to take a last
glance of this. The glance was more amusing than any he had
known in his active life, but it was more infinitely more
chaotic and complex. ^
Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or there-
abouts, he had been repeating that he really must go to Baireuth.
Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him
come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager and
appreciative as ever, at the little old town of Rothenburg-on-the
Taube, and they went on to the Baireuth festival together.
Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would
have opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether
different from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo set-
ting of Baireuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and
Briinhilde, perhaps even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the
world, calm, contemplative, and remote. In 1901 the world had
altogether changed, and Wagner had become a part of it, as fa-
miliar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo element jarred.
Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna perhaps the Potomac
j tse lf had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, and
one could hardly listen to the "Gotterdammerung" in New York,
among throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms
of nervous excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at
Baireuth, as though the gods were Bavarian composers. New
York or Paris might be whatever one pleased venal, sordid,
TEUFELSDROCKH 405
vulgar but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its decay,
certain anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art. Per-
haps they were; and at all events, Wagner was chiefly responsible
for them as artistic emotion. New York knew better than Bai-
reuth what Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris had more
than once included the rising of the Seine to drown out the Etoile
or Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts spells
of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery in
the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would
surely happen there, while no one could conceive of its happen-
ing at Baireuth, or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with
catastrophe as though it were an old mistress faced it almost
gaily as she had done so often, for they were acquainted since
Rome began to ravage Europe; while New York met it with a
glow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard
Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and
thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular
oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm,
but the Fluch-motif went home.
Adams had been carried with the tide till Briinhilde had become
a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy;
though not with socialism, which, to young men who nourished
artistic emotions under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed hope-
lessly bourgeois, and lowest middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe
Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of
Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under
the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a party saw
no inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and audience
were relatively stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.
Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian anar-
chist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had
supposed himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau
406 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Wagner and the Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the
Senator, yearning for sterner study, pointed to a haven at Mos-
cow. For years Adams had taught American youth never to travel
without a Senator who was useful even in America at times, but
indispensable in Russia where, in 1901, anarchists, even though
conservative and Christian, were ill-seen.
This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian
anarchist, as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer
rightly understood. By the necessity of their philosophical de-
scent, each member of the fraternity denounced the other as un-
equal to his lofty task and inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no
third member could be so much as considered, since the great
principle of contradiction could be expressed only by opposites;
and no agreement could be conceived, because anarchy, by defini-
tion^ nayst be chaps and collision, as in the kinetic theory of a per-
fect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction was itself agreement,
a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent with freedom; but
the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement provided it
were strictly confined to the end of larger contradiction. Thus
the great end of all philosophy the "larger synthesis" was
attained, but the process was arduous, and while Adams, as the
older member, assumed to declare the principle, Bay Lodge neces-
sarily denied both the assumption and the principle in order to
assure its truth.
Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conserva-
tive and Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the
end; and, to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to
concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply and in-
tensify forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and magnify
momentum, partly because this was the mechanical law of the
universe as science explained it; but partly also in order to get
done with the present which artists and some others complained
TEUFELSDROCKH 407
of; and finally and chiefly because a rigorous philosophy re-
quired it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and satisfy man's
destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate contra-
diction,
Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this scheme
was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but such ob-
jection meant only that the critic should begin his education in
any infant school in order to learn that anarchy which should be
logical would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian
anarchist, the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental
ideas of Russian mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy
merely to disguise their innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee
Rectus were ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe,
resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made
a pretence of anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order
ai;d unity. Neither of them had formed any other conception
of the universe than what they had inherited from the priestly
class to which their minds obviously belonged. With them, as
with the socialist, communist, or collectivist, the mind that fol-
lowed nature had no relation; if anarchists needed order, they
must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had
enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian
anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faith except the
nature of nature itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the
fault of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation
of duty could scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to
prove it. Only the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order
except the Church had ever satisfied the philosopher recon-
ciled the conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own.
Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that hardly
more people could understand them than understood Wagner or
Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men have
been mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such
refinements were Gree~k or German, and affected the practical
408 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
American but little. He admitted that, for the moment, the dark-
ness was dense. He could not affirm with confidence, even to him-
self, that his " largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to be
chaos, since he would be equally obliged to deny the chaos. The
poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of thought for
thought's sake had mostly ceased. The Jthrob of fifty or a hun-
dred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and
already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all
the ridejrs they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one
was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and
worked merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian
anarchist saw light. ~
Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to Russia
in order to enlarge his "synthesis" and much he needed it! In
America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the faith was
natKmal, racial, geographic. The true American had never seen
such supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades between
social anarchy and social order as to mark it for exclusively human
and his own. He never had known a complete. Bunion either in
Church or State or thought, and had never seen any need for it.
The freedom gave him courage to meet any contradiction, and
intelligence..BQUgh to ignore it.^ Exactly the opposite condition
had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire was a phase of
conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history than
all the complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts,
sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These were Nature pure and
anarchic as the conservative Christian anarchist saw Nature
active^ vibrating, mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on
igrce; but, from the first glimpse one caught from the sleeping-car
window, in the early morning, of the Polish Jew at the accidental
railway station, in all his weird horror, to the last vision of the
Russian peasant, lighting his candle and kissing his ikon before
the railway Virgin in the station at St. Petersburg, all was logi-
cal, conservative, Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in
TEUFELSDROCKH 409
common with any ancient or modern world that history knew;
she had been the oldest source of all civilization in Europe, and
had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known
such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution what-
ever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture
in the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the
twentieth. Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian
anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with
a negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose ener-
gies had been sucked out an inert residuum with movement
of pure inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past un-
dulations of nomad life herders deserted by their leaders and
herds wandering waves stopped in their wanderings waiting
for their winds or warriors to return and lead them westward;
tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost
the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence.
They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place,
and could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink
of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity
of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's
day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student
had no need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff
or Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis
of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough:
Kropotkin answered every purpose.
The Russian people could never have changed could they
ever be changed ? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken
up, or take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller
scale, the question was old and unanswered. All the so-called
primitive races, and some nearer survivals, had raised doubts
which persisted against the most obstinate convictions of evolu-
tion. The Senator himself shook his head, and after surveying
Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to St. Petersburg to
ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff. Their conver-
410 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
sation added new doubts; for their efforts had been immense, their
expenditure enormous, and their results on the people seemed to
be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or fifteen years
of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for, since 1898,
Russia lagged^
~TKe~ tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed
disposed to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For
him, all opinion founded on fact must be ,e.npr, because the facts
can never be complete, and their relations must be always iufinite.
Very likely, Russia would instantly become the most brilliant con-
stellation of human progress through all the ordered stages of
good; but meanwhile one might give a value as movement of
inertia to the mass, and assume a slow acceleration that would,
at the end of a generation, leave the gap between east and west
relatively the same.
This result reached, the Lodges thought their moral improve-
ment required a visit to Berlin; but forty years of varied emotions
had not deadened Adams's memories of Berlin, and he preferred,
at any cost, to escape new ones. When the Lodges started for
Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed happily,
in a day or two, at Stockholm.
Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he
gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt
whether Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand
Duke, or the Emperor, knew much more about it than their
neighbors; and Adams was quite sure that, even in America, he
should listen with uncertain confidence to the views of any Secre-
tary of the Treasury, or railway president, or President of the
United States whom he had ever known, that should concern the
America of the next generation. The mere fact that any man
should dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to judge.
Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of
TEUFELSDROCKH 41 1
unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she represented three-
fourths of the human race, and her movement might be the true
movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration
of America. No one could yet know what would best suit human-
ity, and the tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught
himself talking as bear or as monkey according to the mirror he
held before him. "Am I satisfied?" he asked:
"Moi? pourquoi non?
N'ai-je pas quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres?
Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproche;
Mais pour mon frere Tours, on ne Pa qu'ebauche;
Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre/'
Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in details,
his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or decorative,
nor was he in the least sure what form it might take even in one
generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of three. No
man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would do
to him; but so much was sure; the monkey and motor were terribly
afraid of the bear; how much, only a man close to their foreign
departments knew. As the monkey looked back across the Baltic
from the safe battlements of Stockholm, Russia looked more por-
tentous than from the Kremlin.
The image was that of the retreating ice-cap a wall of archaic
glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of archaic ice
that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the northward, and
more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever at its mercy.
Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that crossed the
level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea, merely extended
the northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and Poles on one side
still struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained
their own energies under the same conditions that caused inertia
across the frontier. Race ruled tJiecqnditjonsj conditions hardly
affected race; and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what
race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and
4-12 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnol-
ogists disputed its very existence; no btlS : "kilW what to make of
it; yet, without the clue, history was a nursery tale.
The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic
as they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous
mass of inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever
Russia moved. From Stockholm one looked back on it as though
it were an ice-sheet, and so had Stockholm watched it for centu-
ries. In contrast with the dreary forests of Russia and the stern
streets of St. Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and
Sweden lured the tourist on. Through a cheerful New England
landscape and bright autumn, he rambled northwards till he found
himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway. Education crowded
upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these vast surfaces
of history about which he had lectured and read for a life-time.
When the historian fully realizes his ignorance which some-
times happens to Americans he becomes even more tiresome to
himself than to others, because his fhawete^ls irrepressible. Adams
could not get over his astonishment,~!though he had preached the
Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling
Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of
science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started
voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he took the mail
steamer to the north, and on September 14, reached Hammerfest.
Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the deep
fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and reindeer
were watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate channels out-
side, as their ancestors had watched the first Norse fishermen learn
them in the succession of time; but it was not the Laps, or the snow,
or the arctic gloom, that impressed the tourist, so much as the
lights of an electro-magnetic civilization and the stupefying con-
trast with Russia, which more and more insisted on taking the
first place in historical interest. Nowhere had the new forces
TEUFELSDROCKH 413
so vigorously corrected the errors of the old, or so effectively re-
dressed the balance of the ecliptic. As one approached the end
the spot where, seventy years before, a futile Carlylean Teufels-
drockh had stopped to ask futile questions of the silent infinite
the infinite seemed to have become loquacious, not to say
familiar, chattering gossip in one's ear. An installation of electric
lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap,
beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer Teu-
felsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent
electric lights of Hammerfest.
He had good reason better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had
ever told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without
means of speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent
itself to gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, break-
fasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across
the neighboring table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, an-
nouncing an attempt on the life of President McKinley, and from
Stockholm to Trondhjem, and so up the coast to Hammerfest, day
after day the news came, telling of the President's condition, and
the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt, until at last a little
journal was cried on reaching some dim haven, announcing the
President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death of
McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth
of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends,
sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to
correct the faults of the solar system. The electro-dynamo-social
uiiiver^e worked better than the sun.
No such strange chance hacTever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous^ and wholly in the liues
of unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across
the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become
414 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
an abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare
glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision,
and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped
these spectral islands without consciousness that only a day's
steaming to the northward would bring him to the ice-barrier,
ready at any moment to advance, which obliged tourists to stop
where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen had stopped so long
ago that memory of their very origin was lost. Adams had never
before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to make of it; but
he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian fishermen ancestors,
doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands, jammed with their
faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the ice-cap of Russian inertia
pressing from behind, and the ice a tnjBingjdanger compared with
the inertia. From the day they first followed the retreating ice-
cap round the North Cape, down to the present moment, their
problem was the same.
The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long
line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession,
divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate or geography
or soil.
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no
one knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wan-
dered south again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and
Cologne. A mere glance showed him that here was a Germany
new to mankind. Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis.
In forty years, the green rusticity of Diisseldorf had taken on the
sooty^ grime of Birmingham. The Rhine in 1900 resembled the
Rhine of 1858 much as it resembled the Rhine of the Salic Franks.
Cologne was a railway centre that had completed its cathedral
which bore an absent-minded air of a cathedral of Chicago, The
TEUFELSDROCKH 415
thirteenth century, carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked
up, was visible to tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling,
curiosity. Th^^ine^was more_modern than the Hudson, as might
well be, since it produced^ far more~ coal; tut all this counted for
little beside the radical changeln the lines of force.
In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe^, as well as the Dan-
ube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric
highway between,, Asia. arid thejxean, The trade-route followed
tRe old routes of invasion, and Cologne was a resting-place between
Warsaw and Flanders. Throughout northern Germany, Russia
was felt even more powerfully than France. In 1901 Russia had
vanished, and not even France was felt; hardly England or
America. Coal alone was felt its stamp alone pervaded the Rhine
district and persisted to Picardy a^nd^the stamp was the same
as that of^Birniingham and Pittsburgh. The '^Kne""pfo3u'ced the
same power, and the power produced the same people the
same mind the same impulse. For a man sixty-three years
old who had no hope of earning a living, these three months of
education were the most arduous he ever attempted, and Russia
was the most indigestible morsel he ever met; but the sum of it,
viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable. From Hammerfest to
Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean from Halifax to Norfolk
on the other onejjreat empire was ruled by one great emperor
Coal. Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or
divide it, but the power and the empire were one. Unity had gained
that ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there an older, perhaps a
surer, power, resting on the eternal law of inertia, held its own.
As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers be*
came more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian inertia
was moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in its
path. As long as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de Witte
fall, Hay would totter. One could only sit down and watch the
doings of Mr. de Witte and Mr. de Plehve.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy
to stop the activity of their twenty-million-horse-power
society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would
have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to
regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis,
to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political murders, that
would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown
scarcely a shadow on the White House.
The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death
of his son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that
of his chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his
recovery/' The world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have
acquired the funeral habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him
yesterday, and he did not know me." Among the letters of con-
dolence showered upon him was one from Clarence King at Pasa-
dena, "heart-breaking in grace and tenderness the old King
manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till nature and the
foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of King impressed him
intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said "the best
and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often
sickened me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind
luck; hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of
life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering,
alone and uncared-for, in a California tavern. Qa vous amuse, la vie ? "
The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed
on the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's fu-
neral, and from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE 417
than that which led to Washington, where a revolution had oc-
curred that must in any case have made the men of his age in-
stantly old, but which, besides hurrying to the front the generation
that till then he had regarded as boys, could not fail to break the
social ties that had till then held them all together.
(?# vous amuse , la vie ? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt
half glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only
to save himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure
loss. On that side, his education had been finished at school. His
friends in power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total
wreck by trying to save them.
As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To
them at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken
seriously in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new
one. fower when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious
of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and com-
bative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any
other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the sin-
gular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter the
quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God Jie was pure
act. With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable
energy, in the White House, the relation of age to youth of
teacher to pupil was altogether out of place; and no other was
possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, wiiile Adams's
ceased of itself. History's truths are little valuable now; but human
nature retains a few of its archaic, proverbial laws, and the wis-
est courtier that ever lived Lucius Seneca himself must have
remained in some shade of doubt what advantage he should get
from the power of his friend and pupil Nero Claudius, until, as a
gentleman past sixty, he received Nero's filial invitation to kill
himself. Seneca closed the vast circle of his knowledge by learning
that a friend in power was a friend lost a fact very much worth
insisting upon while the gray-headed moth that had fluttered
4i 8 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
through many moth-administrations and had singed his wings
more or less in them all, though he now slept nine months out of
the twelve, acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him
to the north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a sufficient
habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from hovering
between them.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always de-
ceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he
was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable dis-
aster. J^ower is poison. >Jts effect on Presidents had been always
tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse
reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced
as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or
knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs
of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent,
but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn
out most tempers in a month, and his first year of Presidency
showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The effect
of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
because it must represent the same process in society, and the
power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the con-
trol of the infinite.
Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but this
is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of
history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The personal
lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason
why Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result was mathe-
matically certain. With Hay, it was only the steady decline of
strength, and the necessary economy of force; but with Lodge it
was law of politics. He could not help himself, for his position as
the President's friend and independent statesman at once was
false, and he must be unsure in both relations.
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE 419
To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great
much greater than that of the usual Senator but it hung on his
position in Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive
patronage; and his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure.
Nowhere in America was society so complex or change so rapid.
No doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic
irritability a sort of Bostonitis which, in its primitive Puri-
tan forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors, and
thinking too much of himself. "Many years earlier William M.
Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New
England behind a New England leader. The trait ied to good ends
such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washing-
ton but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards
were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly
multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to
become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough
State Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old Congrega-
tional clergy another; Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in
social influence, a third; the foreign element, especially the Irish,
held aloof, and seldom consented to approve any one; the new
socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to become more exclusive
than the Irish. New power was disintegrating society, and setting
it coul3
^io to hold thejnachine together* NojaaOQuId^ it faith-
fully as a whole.
" Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but
the task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than
in that of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for
study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting
of the two. Roosevelts are bornand nevsiLcan j>e taught^utjLodgs
was a creature of teaching Boston incarnate the child of his
local parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the
intent, though virtuous, was as Adams admitted in his own case
restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit,
420 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory,
he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but
shifted, sometimes with painful.straia.of temper, from one sensitive
piuscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromis-
ing Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer
atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian
of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought
saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste
revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and
Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and
happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare
standing first on the social, then on the political foot; now wor-
shipping, now banning; shocked by the wanton display of im-
morality, but practising the license of political usage; sometimes
bitter, often genial, always intelligent Lodge had the singular
merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like
crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and,
like his flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness
that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and
might have a future, if they could but divine it.
Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the in-
consequences of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were
also at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust of English
thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac, sometimes
precious but never sure. For him, only the Greek, the Italian or
the French standards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of
Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his theory never
affected his practice. He knew that his artistic standard was the
illusion of his own mind; that English disorder approached nearer
to truth, if truth existed, than French measure or Italian line, or
German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conserva-
tive Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Chris-
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE 421
tian, but stupendously anarchistic. He loved the atrocities of
English art and society, as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss
Austen, not because of their example, but because of their humor.
He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying consistency
but he was not a Senator.
Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are
apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams hadTno reason to care whether
his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than
he; but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they
were always liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion
yield suddenly under their feet. With this game an elderly friend
had long before carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There
was nothing in it for him but the amusement of the pugilist or
acrobat. The larger study was lost in the division of interests and
the ambitions of fifth-rate men; but foreign affairs dealt only with
large units, and made personal relation possible with Hay which
could not be maintained with Roosevelt or Lodge. As an affair
of pure education the point is worth notice from young men who
are drawn into politics. The work of domestic progress is done by*
masses of mechanical power steam, electric, furnace, or other
which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals
who have shown capacity to manage it. The work of internal
government has become the task of controlling these men, who are
socially as remote as heathjeji gods, alone worth knowing, but
never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one
skinned them alive. Most of them have nothing to tell, but are
forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the development or
economy of power. They are trustees for the public, and whenever
society assumes the property, it must confer on them that title;
but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and will
then control society without appeal, as it controls its stokers and
pit-men. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men buj>
of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of
force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer
422 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and
the men tend ^Q. succumb, to their QWB,.motiye forces. " '
This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially in
mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while
for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that,
in domestic politics, every one works for an immediate object,
commonly for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon,
while in foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide
as the world. There the merest scholar could see what he was doing.
For history, international relations are the only sure standards of
movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adams
had always insisted that international relation was the only sure
base for a chart of history.
He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he
found it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as
much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and round
him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found
Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. The
Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world
which Congress would rather ignore; of obligations which Con-
gress repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress dis-
trusts and tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since the
first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the
Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to
extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls in Sena-
tors' service.
This is a matter of history which any one may approve or
dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an
old scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865.
Hay had become the most imposing figure ever known in the
office. He had an influence that no other Secretary of State ever
possessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had
never imagined. He needed to write no state papers j he wanted no
THE HEIGHT OP KNOWLEDGE 423
help, and he stood far above counsel or advice; but he could instruct
an attentive scholar as no other teacher in the world could do; and
Adams sought only instruction wanted only to chart the inter-
national channel for fifty years to come; to triangulate the future;
to obtain his dimension, and fix the acceleration of movement
in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philos-
ophy and physics; in finance and force.
Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at last
the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he had
achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate,
with only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to renounce,
without equivalent, treaty rights which she had for fifty years
defended tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph in his ne-
gotiations with the Senate enabled him to carry one step further
his measures for general peace. About England the Senate could
make no further effective opposition, for England was won, and
Canada alone could give trouble. The next difficulty was with
France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England as-
sumed the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected
the object a combination which, as late as 1901, had been vi-
sionary. The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring Ger-
many into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most un-
manageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed.
This was the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism; the
system of combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home,
and realizable abroad.
With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
century, had nothing to do, and made not the least pretence of
meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining govern-
ments, like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist
scheme of Jaures and Bebel. That John Hay, of all men, should
adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more ab^urd_than conserva-
tive Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the only ort&p-
424 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
doxy in politics as in science. When one saw the field, one realized
that Hay could not help himself, nor could Bebel. Either Germany
must destroy England and France to create the next inevitable
unification as a system of continent against continent or she
must pool interests. Both schemes in turn were attributed to the
Kaiser; one or the other he would have to choose; opinion was
balanced doubtfully on their merits; but, granting both to be
feasible, Hay's and McKinley's statesmanship turned on the
point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the
Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible
alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in
Russia. Thus Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were partners.
The problem was pretty * even fascinating and, to an old
Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometri-
cal demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life, it had all
sorts of ultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet
theory and practice it risks going astray; and Hay was prob-
ably the most accomplished master of both then living. He knew
not only the forces but also the men, and he had no other thought
than his policy.
Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a
scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole edu-
cational staff of the Government at a time when the Government
had just reached the heights of highest activity and influence.
Since 1860, education had done its worst, under the greatest mas-
ters and at enormous expense to the world, to train these two
minds to catch and comprehend every spring of international
action, not to speak of personal influence; and the entire machin-
ery of politics in several great countries had little to do but sup-
ply the last and best information. Education could be carried no
further.
With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its ef-
fects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his
ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE 425
to be groping in darkness to be falling forever in space; and the
worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed,
that no one knew more. He had, at least, the mechanical assurance
of certain values to guide him like the relative intensities of
his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his Gun-powers but
he conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every
relative value of persons, as well as he knew the inmost thoughts
of his own Government had the Czar and the Kaiser and the
Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught him all they
knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew nothing
themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the stu-
dent measure his own.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
THE years hurried past, and gave hardly time to note their
work. Three or four months, though big with change,
come to an end before the mind can catch up with it.
Winter vanished; spring burst into flower; and again Paris opened
its arms, though not for long. Mr. Cameron came over, and took
the castle of Inverlochy for three months, which he summoned his
friends to garrison. Lochaber seldom laughs, except for its children,
such as Camerons, McDonalds, Campbells and other products of
the mist; but in the summer of 1902 Scotland put on fewer airs
of coquetry than usuaL Since the terrible harvest of 1879 which
one had watched sprouting on its stalks on the Shropshire hillsides,
nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled to
Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not
much gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at
last, in desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois
de Boulogne, and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a
better citizen. Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred
to Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long sum-
mers to come, he hid in ignorance and silence.
Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a work-
ing arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift,
the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and
back, with a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as summer
taught, winter tested, and one had only to watch the apparent
movement of the stars in order to guess one's declination. The
process is possible only for men who have exhausted auto-motion.
Adams never knew why, knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to
mimic Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where
he had always seen lines of will. Perhaps the effect of knowing no
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE 427
mathematics is to leave the mind to imagine figures images
phantoms; one's mind Js a watery mirror at best; but, once con-
ceived, the image" became rapidly simple, and the lines of force
presented themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted
<^ly j^^tde^attractioiis. By this path, the mind steppedlnto
the mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and en-
tered a distinct new phase of education.
This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres.
Like his masters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the
eternal mystery of Force the sink of all science. For thousands
of years in history, he found that Force had been felt as occult
attraction love of God and lust for power in a future life.
After 1500, when tKislittraction began to decline, philosophers
fell back on some vis a tergo instinct of danger from behind,
like Darwin's survival of the fittest; and one of the greatest minds,
between Descartes and Newton Pascal saw the master-motor
of man in ennui, which was also scientific: "I have ofteroaidihat
allthe troubles^of man come from his not knowing how to sit still."
Mere restlessness forces action. "So passes the whole of life.
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the
repose is insupportable; for we think either of the troubles we
have, or of those that threaten us; and even if we felt safe on every
side, ennui would of its own accord spring up from the depths of the
heart where it is rooted by nature, and would fill the mind with its
venom."
"If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast."
Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change, but failed
to^ account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force
was essential; a force from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal
and all the old philosophies called this outside force God or Gods.
Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on tracing the Force,
Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and asked her
428 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
to show him God, face to face, as she did for St. Bernard. She
replied, kindly as ever, as though she were still the young mother
of to-day, with a sort of patient pity for masculine dulness: "My
dear outcast, what is it you seek? This is the Church of Christ!
If you seek him through me, you are welcome, sinner or saint;
but he and I are one. We are Love! We have little or nothing to
do with God's other energies which are infinite, and concern us the
less because our interest is only in man, and the infinite is not know-
able to man. Yet if you are troubled by your ignorance, you see
how I am surrounded by the masters of the schools! Ask them!"
The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British
science which had repeated since Bacon that one must not try to
know the unknowable, though one was jjuite powerless to ignore
it; but the Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of
interest in all perfections except her own was honester than the
formal phrase of science; since nothing was easier than to follow her
advice, and turn to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern phy-
sicists, answered at once and plainly: "To me," said St. Thomas,
"Christ and the Mother are one Force Love simple, single,
and sufficient for all human wants; but Love is a human interest
which acts even on man so partially that you and I, as philosophers,
need expect no share in it. Therefore we turn to Christ and the
Schools who represent all other Force. We deal with Multiplicity
and call it God. After the Virgin has redeemed by her personal
Force as Love all that is redeemable in man, the Schools embrace
the rest, and give it Form, Unity, and Motive."
This chart of Force was more easily studied than any other pos-
sible scheme, for one had but to do what the Church was always
promising to do abolish in one flash of lightning not only
man, but also the. Church itself, tfee earth, the other planets, and
the sun, v in order to clear the air; Vithout affecting mediaeval
science. iHie student felt "warranted in doing what the Church
threatened abolishing his solar system altogether in order
to look at God as actual; continuous movement, universal cause,
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE 429
and interchangeable force. This was pantheism, but the Schools
were pantheist; at least as pantheistic as the Energetik of the
Germans; and their deity was the ultimate energy, whose thought
and act were one.
Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas
seemed rather more scientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach.
Contradiction for contradiction, Attraction for attraction, Energy
for energy, St. Thomas's idea of God had merits. Modern science
offered not a vestige of proof, or a theory of connection be-
tween its forces, or any scheme of reconciliation between thought
and mechanics ; while St. Thomas at least linked together the
jbiiits of his machine. As far as a superficial student could follow,
the thirteenth century supposed mind to be a mode of force directly
derived from the intelligent prime motor, and the cause of all form
and sequence in the universe therefore the only proof of unity.
Without thought in the unit, there could be no unity; without
unity no orderly sequence or ordered society. Thought alone
was Form. Mind and Unity flourished or perished together.
This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty
educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a
Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guar-
anteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his
predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of
religion.
In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways:
the first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas;
the second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than
atheismi, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any
price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance, one neces-
sarily fell upon the famous old bear that scared children at play;
but, even had the animal shown more logic than its victim, one
had learned from Socrates to distrust, above all other traps, the
trap of logic the mirror of the mind. ' Yet the search for a unit
of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of thou-
43 o THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
sands of educations h^d^i^nd their end. Generation after genera-
tion of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content to
stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in
company with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of
them had ever found a logicaMughroad of escape.
Adams cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear
that he could not stop there, even to enjoy the society of Spinoza
an3 Thomas Aquiiias7 True, tHe Church alone had asserted unity
wltTi any conviction, and the historian alone knew what oceans
of blood and treasure the assertTorTKaH cost; but the only honest
alternative to affirming unity was to deny it; and the denial would
require a new education. At sixty-five years old a new education
promised hardly more than the old.
Possibly the modern legislator or magistrate might no longer
know enough to treat as the Church did the man who denied unity,
unless the denial took the form of a bomb; but no teacher would
know how to explain what he thought he meant by denying unity.
Society would certainly punish the denial if ever any one learned
enough to understand it. Philosophers, as a rule, cared little what
principles society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher com-
monly held that though he might sometimes be right by good
luck on some one point, no complex of individual opinions could
possibly be anything but wrong; yet, supposing society to be ig-
nored, the philosopher was no further forward. Nihilism had no
bottom. For thousands of years every philosopher had stood on
the shore of this sunless sea, diving for pearls and never finding
them. All had seen that, since they could not find bottom, they
must assume it. The Church claimed to have found it, but, since
1450, motives for agreeing on some new assumption of Unity,
broader and deeper than that of the Church, had doubled in force
until even the universities and schools, like the Church and State,
seemed about to be driven into an attempt to educate, though
specially forbidden to do it.
Like most of his generation, Adams had taken the word of sci-
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE 431
ence that the new unit was as good as found. It would not be an
intelligence- probably not even a consciousness but TFwould
serye^ He passed sixty years waiting for it, and at the end of that
time, on reviewing the ground, he was led to think that the final
synthesis of science and its ultimate triumph was the kinetic
theory of gases ; which seemed to cover all motion in space, and
to furnish the measure of time. So far as he understood it, the
theory asserted that any portion of space is occupied by mole-
cules of gas, flying in right lines at velocities varying up to a mile
in a second, and colliding with each other at intervals varying up
to 17,750,000 times in a second. To this analysis if one under-
stood it right all matter whatever was reducible, and the only
difference of opinion in science regarded the doubt whether a still
deeper analysis would reduce the atom of gas to pure motion. >
Thus, unless one mistook the meaning of motion, which might
well be, the scientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the
scientific analysis commonly called Multiplicity. The two things
were the same, all forms being shifting phases of motion. Grant-
ing this ocean of colliding atoms, the last hope of humanity, what
happened if one dropped the sounder into the abyss let it go
frankly gave up Unity altogether? What was Unity? Why
was one to be forced to affirm it?
Here everybody flatly refused help. Science seemed content
with its old phrase of "larger synthesis," which was well enough
for science, but meant chaos for man. One would have been glad
to stop and ask no more, but the anarchist bomb bade one go on,
and the bomb is a powerful persuader. One could not stop, even
to enjoy the charms of a perfect gas colliding seventeen million
times in a second, much like an automobile in Paris. JScience itself
had been crowded so close to the edge of the abyss that its attempts
to escape were as metaphysical as the leap,, while an ignorant old
man felt no motive for trying to escape, seeing that the only es-
cape possible lay in the form of vis ajergo commonly called Death.
fie got out his Descartes again; dipped into his Hume and Berke-
432 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered solemnly over his
Hegel and Schopenhauer and Hartmann; strayed gaily away
with his Greeks all merely to ask what Unity meant, and what
happened when one denied it.
Apparently one never denied it. /Every philosopher, whether
sane or insane, naturally affirmed it. The utmost flight of anarchy
seemed to have stopped with the assertion of two principles, and
even these fitted into each other, like good and evil, light and
darkness. Pessimism itself, black as it might be painted, had been
content to turn the universe of contradictions into the human
thought as one. Will, and treat it as representation. Metaphysics
insisted on treating the universe as one thought or treating thought
as one universe; and philosophers agreed, like a kinetic gas, that the
universe could be known only as motion of mind, and therefore
as unity. One could know it only as one's self; it was psychology.
Of all forms of pessimism, the metaphysical form was, for a his-
torian, the least enticing. Of all studies, the one he would rather
have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy
so heartrending as introspection, and the more, because as
Mephistopheles said of Marguerite r he was not the first. Nearly
all the highest intelligence known to history had drowned itself
in the reflection of its own thought, and the bovine survivors had
rudely told the truth about it, without affecting the intelligent.
One's own time had not been exempt. Even since 1870 friends
by scores had fallen victims to it. Within five-and-twenty years,
a new library had grown out of it. Harvard College was a focus
of the study; France supported hospitals for it; England published
magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to take one's mind in
one's hand, and ask one's psychological friends what they made
of it, and the more because it mattered so little to either party,
since their minds, whatever they were, had pretty nearly ceased
to reflect, and let them do what they liked with the small remnant,
they could scarcely do anything very new with it. All one asked
was to learn what they hoped to do.
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE 433
Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance in silence had, by this
time, led the weary pilgrim into such mountains of ignorance
that he could no longer see any path whatever, and could not even
understand a signpost. He failed to fathom the depths of the new
psychology, which proved to him that, on that side as on the
mathematical side, his power of thought was atrophied, if, indeed,
it ever existed. Since he could not fathom the science, he could
only ask the simplest of questions: Did the new psychology hold
that the tyvxn $ ou l or mind fc was or was not a unit? He
gathered from the books that the psychologists had, in a few cases,
distinguished several personalities in the same mind, each con-
scious and constant, individual and exclusive. The fact seemed
scarcely surprising, since it had been a habit of mind from earliest
recorded time, and equally familiar to the last acquaintance who
had taken a drug or caught a fever, or eaten a Welsh rarebit be-
fore bed; for surely no one could follow the action of a vivid dream,
and still need to be told that the actors evoked by his mind were
not himself, but quite unknown to all he had ever recognized as
self. The new psychology went further, and seemed convinced
that it had actually split personality not only into dualism, but
also into complex groups, like telephonic centres and systems,
that might be isolated and called up at will, and whose physical
action might be occult in the sense of strangeness to any known
form of force. Dualism seemed to have become as common as
binary stars. Alternating personalities turned up constantly, even
among one's friends. The facts seemed certain, or at least as
certain as other facts; all they needed was explanation.
This was not the business of the searcher of ignorance, who felt
himself in no way responsible for causes. To his mind, the com-
pound tyuxn took at once the form of a bicycle-rider, mechanically
balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities, and sure
to fall into the sub-conscious chaos below, if one of his inferior
personalities got on top. The only absolute truth was the sub-con-
scious chaos below, which every one could feel when he sought it.
434 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Whether the psychologists admitted it or not, mattered little
to the student who, by the law of his profession, was engaged in
studying his own mind. On him, the effect was surprising. JHe
woke^up with a shudder as though he had himself fallen off his
bicycle. If his mind were really this sort of giagnet, mechanically
dispersing its lines of force when it went to sleep, and mechani-
cally orienting them when it woke up which was normal, the
dispersion orjorientatipn? The mind, like the body, kept its unity
unless itTiappened to lose balanceTJDUt the professor of physics,
who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself, knew no more than
an idiot what knocked him down, though he did know what the
idiot could hardly do :_ that his normal condition was idiocy,
qr_want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice. His
normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence; the
simultaneous action of different thought-centres without central
control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an
acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, crossing a chasm on a slack-
rope, arid commonly.breaking iiis neck.
By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead
nothing but a dissolving mind and the historian felt himself
driven back on thought as one continuous Force, without Race,
Sex, School, Country, or Church. This has been always the fate
of rigorous thinkers, and has always succeeded in making them
famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste Comte. Their
method made what progress the science of history knew, which
was little enough, but they did at last fix the law that, if history
ever meant to correct the errors she made in detail, she must
agree on a scale for the whole. Every local historian might defy
this law till history ended, but its necessity would be the same
for man as for space or time or force, and without it the historian
would always remain a child in science.
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured
by motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by sug-
gesting a unit the point of history when man held the highest
THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE 435
idea of himself 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 phi-
losophy and mechanics. Setting himself 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. There^
upon, he sailed for home.
CHAPTER XXX
VIS INERTIAE (1903)
WASHINGTON was always amusing, but in 1900, as
in 1800, its chief interest lay in its distance from New
York. The movement of New York had become plane-
tary beyond control while the task of Washington, in 1900
as in 1800, was to control it. The success of Washington in the
past century promised ill for its success in the next.
To a student who had passed the best years of his life in pon-
dering over the political philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin, and
Madison, the problem that Roosevelt took in hand seemed alive
with historical interest, but it would need at least another half-
century to show its results. As yet,, one could not measure the forces
or their arrangement; the forces had not even aligned themselves
except in foreign affairs; and there one turned to seek the chan-
nel of wisdom as naturally as though Washington did not exist.
The President could do nothing effectual in foreign affairs, but
at least he could see something of the field.
Hay had reached the summit of his career, and saw himself on
the edge of wreck. Committed to the task of keeping China
"open," he saw China about to be shut. Almost alone in the world,
he represented the "open door," and could not escape being crushed
by it. Yet luck had been with him in full tide. Though Sir Julian
Pauncefote had died in May, 1902, after carrying out tasks that
filled an ex-private secretary of 1861 with open-mouthed astonish-
ment, Hay had been helped by the appointment of Michael Herbert
as his successor, who counted for double the value of an ordinary
diplomat. To reduce frictipo is the chief use of friendship, and in
politics the loss by friction is outrageous. To Herbert and his wife,
the small knot of houses that seemed to give a vague unity to
foreign affairs opened their doors and their hearts, for the Herberts
Vis INERTIAS 437
were already at home there; and this personal sympathy prolonged
Hay's life, for it not only eased the effort of endurance, but it also
led directly to a revolution in Germany. Down to that moment,
the Kaiser, rightly or wrongly, had counted as the ally of the Czar
in all matters relating to the East. Holleben and Cassini were
taken to be a single force in Eastern affairs, and this supposed alli-
ance gave Hay no little anxiety and some trouble. Suddenly
Holleben, who seemed to have had no thought but to obey with
almost agonized anxiety the least hint of the Kaiser's will, re-
ceived a telegram ordering him to pretext illness and come home,
which he obeyed within four-and-twenty hours. The ways of the
German Foreign Office had been always abrupt, not to say ruth-
less, towards its agents, and yet commonly some discontent had
been shown as excuse; but, in this case, no cause was guessed for
Holleben's disgrace except the Kaiser's wish to have a personal
representative at Washington. Breaking down all precedent, he
sent Speck von Sternburg to counterbalance Herbert.
Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy, and valuable
as his presence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling compared
with the political. Of Hay's official tasks, one knew no more than
any newspaper reporter did, but of one's own diplomatic education
the successive steps had become strides. The scholar was studying,
not on Hay's account, but on his own. He had seen Hay, in 1898,
bring England into his combine; he had seen the steady movement
which was to bring France back into an Atlantic system; and now
he saw suddenly the dramatic swing of Germany towards the west
the movement of all others nearest mathematical certainty.
Whether the Kaiser meant it or not, he gave the effect of meaning
to assert his independence of Russia, and to Hay this change of
front had enormous value. The least was that it seemed to isolate
Cassini, and unmask the Russian movement which became more
threatening every month as the Manchurian scheme had to be
revealed.
Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to
438 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
him by the Kaisers coup d'etat. ^Carefully as he had tried to follow
the Kaiser's career, he had never suspected such refinement of
policy, which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's ability to the
highest point, and altogether upset the centre of statesmanship.
'That Germany could be so quickly detached from separate objects
and brought into an Atlantic system seemed a paradox more para-
doxical than any that one's education had yet offered, though it
had offered little but paradox. If Germany could be held there, a
century of friction would be saved. No price would be too great
for such an object; although no price could probably be wrung out
of Congress as equivalent for it. The Kaiser, by one personal act
of energy, freed Hay's hands so completely that he saw his prob-
lems simplified to Russia alone.
Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. JThe his-
tory of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little but
to state one or two sides of the Russian problem. One's year of
Berlin in youth, though it taught no Civil Law, had opened one's
eyes to the Russian enigma, and both German and French histo-
rians had labored over its proportions with a sort of fascinated
horror. Germany, of all countries, was most vitally concerned in
it; but even a cave-dweller in La Fayette Square, seeking only a
measure of motion since the Crusades, saw before his eyes, in the
spring of 1903, a survey of future order or anarchy that would
exhaust the power of his telescopes and defy the accuracy of his
theodolites.
The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every
day more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed
clear signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte
were reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and stu-
dents should have no sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had
private reasons for wishing well to the Czar and his people. At
much length, in several labored chapters of history, he had told
how the personal friendliness of the Czar Alexander I, in 1 8 JO,
saved the fortunes of J. Q. Adams, and opened to him the brilliant
Vis INERTIAE 4.39
diplomatic career that ended in the White House. Even in his
own effaced existence he had reasons, not altogether trivial, for
gratitude to the Czar Alexander 11^ whose firm neutrality had
saved him some terribly anxious days and nights in 1862; while he
had seen enough of Russia to sympathize warmly with Prince
KhilkofF s railways and de Witte's industries. The last and highest
triumph of history would* to his mind, be the bringing of Russia
into the Atlanticj^mbine, and the just and fair allotment of the
whole world among the regulated activities of the universe. At
the rate of unification since 1840, this end should be possible within
another .sixty years; and, in foresight of that point, Adams could
already finish provisionally his chart of international unity;
but, for the moment, the gravest doubts and ignorance covered
the whole field. No one Czar or diplomat, Kaiser or Mikado
seemed to know anything. Through individual Russians one could
always see with ease, for their diplomacy never suggested depth;
and perhaps Hay protected Cassini for the very reason that Cassini
could not disguise an emotion, and never failed to betray that, in
setting the enormous bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China,
he regretted infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too.
He would almost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf.
His political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in
the single idea that Russia must fatally roll must, by her irre-
sistible inertia, crush whatever stpod in her way.
For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the
inertia meant_the failure of American intensity,
^ _
WherTRussia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their
energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither
Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any
Western equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia knocking away the
last blocks that held back the launch of this huge mass into the
China Sea. The vast force of inertia known as China was to be
united with the huge bulk of Russia in a single mass which no
amount of new force could henceforward deflect. Had the Russian
44-O THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Government, with the sharpest sense of enlightenment, employed
scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs, and borrowed all the resources
of Europe, it could not have lifted such a weight; and had no idea
of trying.
These were the positions charted on the map of political unity
by an insect in Washington in the spring of 1903 ; and they seemed
to him fixed. Russia held Europe and America in her grasp, and
Cassini held Hay in his. The Siberian Railway offered checkmate
to all possible opposition. Japan must make the best terms she
could; England must go on receding; America and Germany would
look on at the avalanche. The wall of Russian inertia that barred
Europe across the Baltic, would bar America across the Pacific;
and Hay's policy of the open door would infallibly fail.
Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant
stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany
after it by its mere mass. To the humble student, the loss of Hay's
game affected only Hay; for himself, the game not the stakes
was the chief interest; and though want of habit made him object
to read his newspapers blackened since he liked to blacken them
himself he was in any case condemned to pass but a short space
of time either in Siberia or in Paris, and could balance his endless
columns of calculation equally in either place. The figures, not the
facts, concerned his chart, and he mused deeply over his next
equation. The Atlantic would have to deal with a vast continental
mass of inert motion, like a glacier, which moved, and consciously
moved, by mechanical gravitation alone. Russia saw herself so, and
so must an American see her; he had no more to do than measure,
if he could, the mass. Was volume or intensity the stronger? What
and where was the vis nova that could hold its own before this
prodigious ice-cap of vis inertiae? What was movement of inertia,
and what its laws ?
Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but
he took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to
ask, He found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men than
Vis INERTIAE 441
he. The dictionary said that inertia was a property of matter, by
which matter tends, when at rest, to remain so, and, when in
motion, to move on in a straight line. Finding that, his mind re-
fused to imagine itself at rest or in a straight line, he was forced,
as usual, to let it imagine something else; and since the question
concerned the mind, and not matter, he decided from personal
experience that his mind was never at rest, but moved when
normal about something it called a motive, and never moved
without motives to move it. So long as these motives were habit-
ual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result might, for
convenience, be called movement of inertia, to distinguish it from
movement caused by newer or higher attraction; but the greater
the bulk to move, the greater must be the force to accelerate or
deflect it.
This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student
and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were un-
equally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class
of minds responded only to habit; another only to novelty. Race
classified thought. Class-lists classified mind. No two men thought
alike, and no woman thought like a man.
Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying
the race in order to reconstruct it ; but surely sex-inertia had never
been overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia, maternity and
reproduction are the most typical, and women's property of mov-
ing in a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only
unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the
woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pter-
aspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the
laws oJ inertiaTare to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in
the feminine mincD The American always ostentatiously ignored
sex, and American history mentioned hardly the name of a woman,
44 2 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
while English history handled them as timidly as though they were
a new and undescribed species; but if the problem of inertia
summed up the difficulties of the race question, it involved that
of sex far more deeply, and to Americans vitally. The task of
accelerating or deflecting the movement of the American woman
had interest infinitely greater than that of any race whatever,
Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or African.
On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was con-
scious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As
he grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their interest,
but that Early Women became a passion. Without understanding
movement of sex, history seemed to him mere pedantry. So "in-
sistent had he become on this side of his subject that with women
he talked of little else, and because women's thought is mostly
subconscious and particularly sensitive to suggestion Jhe tried
tricks and devices to disclose it. The woman seldom knows her
own thought; she is as curious to understand herself as the man to
understand her, and responds far more quickly than the man to
a sudden idea. Sometimes, at dinner, one might wait till talk
flagged, and then, as mildly as possible, ask one's liveliest neigh-
bor whether she could explain why the American woman was a fail-
jure^^Without an instant's hesitation, she was sure to answer:
"Because the American man is a failure!" She meant it7
Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the
American men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to
defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but
from the point of view of sex he felt much curiosity to know how
far the woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught
the trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart
from truth, he owed her at least that compliment. The habit led
sometimes to perilous personalities in the sudden give-and-take of
table-talk. This spring, just before sailing for Europe in May,
1 93> he had a message from his sister-in-law, Mrs. Brooks Adams,
to say that she and her sister, Mrs. Lodge, and the Senator were
Vis INERTIAE 443
coming to dinner by way of farewell; Bay Lodge and his lovely
young wife sent word to the same effect; Mrs. Roosevelt joined
the party; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped down to escape the
solitude of his wife's absence. The party were too intimate for
reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby with derision which
stung him to pungent rejoinder: "The American man is a fail-
ure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here more
sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay?
Would n't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would
the President have a ghost of a chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran
against him? Do you want to stop at the Embassy, on your way
home, and ask which would run it best Herbert or his wife?"
The men laughed a little not much] Each probably made allow-
ance for hfs own wife as "aft' unusually superior woman. Some one
afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women were not a fair
average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men were above all
possible average; he could not lay his hands on another half-dozen
their equals.
Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The
cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was bitter
at heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family together,
and her children ran away like chickens with their first feathers;
the family was extinct like chivalry. She had failed not only to
create a new society that satisfied her, but even to hold her own
in the old society of Church or State; and was left, for the most
part, with no place but the theatre or streets to decorate. She
might glitter with historical diamonds and sparkle with wit as
brilliant as the gems, in rooms as splendid as any in Rome at its
best; but she saw no one except her own sex who knew enough to
be worth dazzling, or was competent to pay her intelligent homage.
She might have her own way, without restraint or limit, but she
knew not what to do with herself when free. Never had the world
known a more cagabl^pr, devoted mother, but at forty her task
was over, and she was left with no stage except that of her old
444 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
duties^ or of Washington society where she had enjoyed for a hun-
dred years every advantage, but had created only a medley where
nine men out of ten refused her request to be civilized, and the^
tenth bored her.
On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on
this, the opinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a State
Central Committee or a Railway President, isjworithJess jdhanjthat
of any woman on Fifth Avenue, The inferiority of man on this,
the most important of all social subjects, is manifest. Adams had
here no occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since no wcg&jin in
tfce world would have paid the smallest respect to the opinions
of all professors since the serpent. His own object had little to do
with theirs. He was studying the laws of motion, and had struck
two large questions of vital importance to America inertia of
race and inertia of sex. He had seen Mr. de Witte and Prince
Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the value of three thousand mil-
lion dollars, more or less, upon Russian inertia, in the last twenty
years, and he needed to get some idea of the effects. He had seen
artificial energy to the amount of twenty or five-and-twenty million
steam horse-power created in America since 1840, and as much
more economized, v which had been socially turned over to the
American woman, she being the chief object of social expenditure,
and the household the only considerable object of American ex-
travagance. According to scientific notions of inertia and force,
what ought to be the result ?
In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown
itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed. The
woman had been set free volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's perfect
gas;_alrxiost brought to the point of explosion, like steam. One
had but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of a hundred huge
ocean steamers, or walk through the Place Vendome, or join a
party of Cook's tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the woman had
been set free; but these swarms were ephemeral like clouds of but-
terflies in season, blown away and lost, while the reproductive
Vis INERTIAE 445
sources lay hidden. At Washington, one saw other swarms as grave
gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking themselves seriously,
or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all tEeseliKIffi^
known before 1840, touched the true problem slightly and super-
ficially. Bohind them, in every city, town, and farmhouse, were
myriads of new types or type-writers T!e!epEone and telegraph-
girls, "sKop-clerks, factory-hands, running^ into millions of millions,
an^as ^classes, unknown to themselves as to historians. Even
tliFscKoolmlstresses were inarticulate. All these new women had
teen created since 1848% -$11 were to show their meaning before
'~~~ " " ...... *'
_
^ Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
century of the Church; but this "was" probably survival, and gave
no hint of the future. The problem remained to find out whether
movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take direction
except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be solved in one
generation of American women, and was the most vital of all
problems of force.
The American woman at her best like most other women
exerted great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive
type. She appeared as the result of a long series of discards, and
her chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When closely
watched, she seemed making a violent .effort to follow the man,
who had turned TiTs mind and hand to mechanics. The typical
American man had his hand on a lever and his eye,ouacurveln^is~
road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty
miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hun-
dred, and he cpuldnot admit emotions or anxieties or subconscious
distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or drugs, without
breaking his neck. He could not run his machine and a woman too;
he must leave her, even though his wife, to find her own way^ and
all the world saw her_trying to find her way by imitating him.
The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in femi-
446 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
t been woman's lot since
^problem had been always one of physical strength andjt^wa^as
physical perfection of force thatTiefVenus had governed nature.
Thejwomanj force ha^cou^^iasjnertia of jrotation, and her axis
The idea that she
was weak revolted j^history; iJLw^ a P a ^ on t!gj ca l falsehood
that even an Eocene female monkey wouldThave laughed at; but
it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its
axis, itjnust jfind A&ew field, and the family must pay for it. So
far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the bees, and
must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the race.
The story was not new. For thousands of years women had re-
belled. They had made a fortress of religion had buried them-
selves in the cloister, in self-sacrifice,, in gogd works or even in
bad. One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's studies in the
fourth, as in Homeric and archaic time, showed her always busy
in the illusions of heaven or of hell ambition, intrigue, jealousy,
magic but the American woman had no illusions or ambitions
or new resources, and nothing to rebel against, except her own
maternity; yet the rebels increased by millions from year to year
till they blocked the path of rebellion. Even her field of good
works was narrower than in the twelfth century. Socialism, com-
munism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which promised
paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues of escape
which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before
her only the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.
From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of power
w r as blind. The Church had known more about women than science
will ever know, and the historian who studied the sources of Chris-
tianity felt sometimes convinced that the Church had been made
by the woman chiefly as her protest against man. At times, the
historian would have been almost willing to maintain that the
man had overthrown the Church chiefly because it was feminine.
After the overthrow of the Church, the woman had no refuge
Vis INERTIAE 447
except such as the man created for himself. SJ^wasJree; she had
ijo illuskms; she was sexless; shejiad discarded all that the male
disliked ;_and although she secretly regrettecTtlie discard, she knew
that she could not go backward. She must, like the man, marry
machiuexy. Already the American man sometimes felt surprise
at finding himself regarded as sexless; the American woman was
oftener surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual.
No honest historian can take part with or against the
forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human
race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statis-
tics. No doubt every one in society discussed the subject, impelled
by President Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the surface current
of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent
undercurrent of social action ran in the other; but the truth lay
somewhere unconscious in the woman's breast. An elderly man,
trying only to learn the law of social inertia and the limits of social
divergence could not compel the Superintendent of the Census to
ask every young woman whether she wanted children, and how
many; he could not even require of an octogenarian Senate the
passage of a law obliging every woman, married or not, to bear one
baby at the expense of the Treasury before she was thirty
years old, under penalty of solitary confinement for life; yet these
were vital statistics in more senses than all that bore the name, and
tended more directly to the foundation of a serious society in the
future. He could draw no conclusions whatever except from the
birth-rate. He could not frankly discuss the matter with the young
women themselves, although they would have gladly discussed it,
because Faust was helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could
suggest nothing. The Marguerite of the future could alone decide
whether she were better off than the Marguerite of the past;
whether she would rather be victim to a man, a church, or a
Between these various forms of inevitable inertia sex and
race the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit that
448 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
ignorance against ignorance the Russian problem seemed to
him somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of
race and bulk would require an immense force to overcome it,
but in time it might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex
could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an
immense force, doubling every few years, was working irresistibly
to overcome it. One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest
ignorance that had already engulfed society. Few centres of great
energy lived in illusion more complete or archaic than Washington
with its simple-minded standards of the field and farm, its Southern
and Western habits of life and manners, its assumptions of ethics
and history; but even in Washington, society was uneasy enough
to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act the part
of horseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was uniform
that nothing ever changed and that the woman would swim
about the ocean of future time, as she had swum in the past, with
the gar-fish and the shark, unable to change.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante,
this new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and
Complexity promised to be the longest, though as yet it
had barely touched two familiar regions race and sex. Even
within these narrow seas the navigator lost his bearings and fol-
lowed the winds as they blew. By chance it happened that
Raphael Pumpelly helped the winds; for, being in Washington on
his way to Central Asia he fell to talking with Adams about these
matters, and said that Willard Gibbs thought he got most help
from a book called the "Grammar of Science," by Karl Pearson.
To Adams's vision, Willard Gibbs stood on the same plane with
the three or four greatest minds of his century, and the idea that a
man so incomparably superior should find help anywhere filled
him with wonder. He sent for the volume and read it. From the
time he sailed for Europe and reached his den on the Avenue du
Bois until he took his return steamer at Cherbourg on December 26,
he did little but try to find out what Karl Pearson could have
taught Willard Gibbs.
Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the
right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the
finer values of French or German, and often deceived by the intri-
cacies of thought hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one could
sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning even in Kant
or Hegel- but one had not the right to a suspicion of error where
the tool oitJiought was algebra. Adams could see in such parts of
the "Grammar" as he could understand, little more than an
enlargement of Stallo's book already twenty years old. He never
found out what it could have taught a master like Willard Gibbs,
450 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion to its
science. No such stride had any Englishman before taken in the
lines of English thought. The progress of science was measured
by the success of the " Grammar," when, for twenty years past,
Stallo had been deliberately ignored under the usual conspiracy of
silence inevitable to all thought which demands new thought-
machinery. Science needs time to, reconstruct its instruments, to
follow a reYdutipn in space; a certain lag is inevitable; the most
active" mind cannot instantly swerve from its path; but such revo-
lutions are portentous, and the fall or rise of half-a-dozen empires
interested a student of history less than the rise of the " Grammar
of Science," the more pressingly because, under the silent influence
of Langley, he was prepared to expect it.
For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian
Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of
nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous
address of Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by
a series of papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily
driven the scientific lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl
Pearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the schools.
The phrase is not stronger than that with which the "Grammar of
Science" challenged the fight: "Anything more hopelessly illogical
than the statements with regard to Force and Matter current in
elementary textbooks of science, it is difficult to imagine," opened
Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author of the "elementary text-
book," as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson
shut out of science everything which the nineteenth century had
brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up with a
fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that the
circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for
granted much as the deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle
of light which he generates. "Order and reason, beauty and
benevolence,, are characteristics and conceptions which we find
solely associated with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 45 i
truth, left one's mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and
beauty Deemed to be associated^ also in the mind of a crystal, if
ohe^s senses were to be admitted as judge; but the historian had no
interest in the universal truth of Pearson J s or Kelvin's or Newton's
laws; he sought only their relative drift or direction, and Pearson
went on to say that these conceptions must stop: "Into the chaos
beyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically project them."
We cannot even infer them: "In the chaos behind sensations, in
the * beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order
or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on
tHisjside of sense-impressions"; brut we must infer chaps ," Briefly
chaos is all that science can logically assert of tfie supersensuous."
The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In
plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was tHe dream
of man.
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon
and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protest-
ing that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time
that every one went on thinking about it. The result was as
chaotic as kinetic gas ; but with the thought a historian had nothing
to do. He sought only its direction. For himself he knew, that, in
spite of all the Englishmen that ever lived, he would be forced to
enter supersensual chaos if he meant to find out what became of
British science or indeed of any other science. From Pythag-
oras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done it, although com-
monly science had explored an ocean which it preferred to regard as
Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who taught
that every notion included its own negation, used the negation
only to reach a " larger synthesis," till he reached the universal-
which thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church alone had
constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was
notTjod, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity
could not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to
452 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
agree with the Church, but every one else, including Newton,
Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the supersensual,
calling it :
"One God, one Law, one Element,
And one far-off, divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
Suddenly, in 1900, sciencq raised ,its head and denied. .)
Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as it
seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more inter-
esting to history than the thought. When he reflected about it,
he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at least twenty
years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893; and that
the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump
from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw
on his desjc the metaphysical bomb she called radium. There re-
mained no hole to hide in. Even metaphysics swept back over
science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no one could
longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the unknowable was
known.
' The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant
only for temporary support to be merged in " larger synthesis/'
and had waited for the larger synthesisjn silence and in vain. They
had refused to hear Stallo. They hadTSetraye^Tttle "interest in
Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and
Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leav-
ing science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual
chaos. The confusion seemed, to a mere passenger, worse than
that of 1600 when the astronomers upset the world; it resembled
rather the convulsion, of 310 when the Cimtas Dei cut itself loose
from the Civitas Romae, and the Cross, took the place of ^the legions;
but the historian accepted it all alike; he knew that his opinion
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 453
was worthless; only, in this case, he found himself on the raft,
personally and economically .cQaQemednHts drift.
^English thought had always been, chaos and multiplicity itself,
in which the new step of Karl PearscELmarked_ojQly a consistent
progress; but German thought had affected system, unity; "aSH
abstract truth, to a point that fretted the most patient foreigner,
and to Germany the voyager in strange seas of thought alone might
resort with confident hope of renewing his youth. Turning his
back on Karl Pearson and England, he plunged into Germany,
and had scarcely crossed the Rhine when he fell into libraries
of new works bearing the names of Ostwald, Ernst Mach, Ernst
Haeckel, and others less familiar, among whom Haeckel was
easiest to approach, not only because of being the oldest and
clearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century mechani-
cal convictions, but also because in 1902 he had published a vehe-
ment renewal of his faith. The volume contained only one para-
graph that concerned a historian; it was that in which Haeckel
sank his voice almost to a religious whisper in avowing with
evident effort, that the "proper essence of substance appeared to
him more and more marvellous and enigmatic as he penetrated
further into the knowledge of its attributes matter and energy
and as he learned to know their innumerable phenomena and
their evolution/' Since Haeckel seemed to have begun the voyage
into multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to Englishmen, he
should have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of a "proper
essence of substance" in its attributes of matter and energy; but
Ernst Mach seemed to go yet one step further, for he rejected
matter altogether, and admitted but two processes in nature
change of place and interconversion of forms. Matter was Motion
Tvlotion was Matter the thing moved^
A student of history had no need to understand these scientific
ideas of very great men; he sought only the relation with the ideas
of their grandfathers, and their common direction towards the
ideas of their grandsons. He had long ago reached, with Hegel
454 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
the limits of contradiction j and Ernst Mach scarcely added %
sftacle of variety' to the jdentity of opposites; but both of them
seemed to be in agreement with Karl Pearson on the facts of the
supersensual universe which could^be known only as unknowable.
With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to France.
There he felt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and Mon-
taigne had ever taught anarchy other than as path to order. Chaos
would be unity in Paris even if child of the guillotine. To make this
assurance mathematically sure, the highest scientific authority
in France was a great mathematician, M. Poincare of the In-
stitut, who published in 1902 a small volume called "La Science
et ITfypothese," which purported to be relatively readable.
Trusting to its external appearance, the traveller timidly bought
it, and greedily devoured it, without understanding a single
consecutive page, but catching here and there a period that
startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they seemed to show
that M. Poincare was troubled by the same historical landmarks
which guided or deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we are led,"
said M, Poincare, "to act as though a simple law, when other things
were equal, must be more probable than a complicated law. Half
a century ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed that nature
loves simplicity. She has since given us too often the lie. To-day
this tendency is no longer avowed, and only as much of it is pre-
served as is indispensable so that science shall not become impos-
sible."
Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion
with self-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M.
Poincare shown anarchistic tastes, his evidence would have weighed
less heavily; but he seemed to be the only authority in science
who felt what a historian felt so strongly the need of unity in a
universe. "Considering everything we have made some approach
towards unity. We have not gone as fast as we hoped fifty years
ago; we have not always taken the intended road; but definitely
we have gained much ground." This was the most clear and con-
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 455
vincing evidence of progress yet offered to the navigator of igno-
rance; but suddenly he fell on another view which seemed to him
quite irreconcilable with the first : " Doubtless if our means of in-
vestigation should become more and more penetrating, we should
discover the simple under the complex; then the complex under
the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so on
without ever being able to foresee the last term."
A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised eter-
nal bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian green
with horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no
mathematics, he burned to ask whether M. Poincare knew any
history, since he began by begging the historical question alto-
gether, and assuming that the past showed alternating phases of
simple and complex the precise point that Adams, after fifty
years of effort, found himself forced to surrender; and then going
on to assume alternating phases for the future which, for the weary
Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from the kinetic
theory of a perfect gas.
Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity, Complex-
ity, Anarchy, Chaos. Always and everywhere the Complex had
been true and the Contradiction had been certain. Thought started
by it. Mathematics itself began by counting one two three;
then imagining their continuity, which M. Poincare was still ex-
hausting his wits to explain or defend; and this was his explanation:
"In short, the mind has the faculty of creating symbols, and it is
thus that it has constructed mathematical continuity which is
only a particular system of symbols." With the same light touch,
more destructive in its artistic measure than the heaviest-handed
brutality of Englishmen or Germans, he went on to upset relative
truth itself: "How should I answer the question whether Euclidian
Geometry is true? It has no sense! . . . Euclidian Geometry is, and
will remain, the most convenient."
Chaos was a primary fact even in Paris especially in Paris
456 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
asjt was in the Book of Genesis ; but every thinking being in Paris
or out of it had exhausted^ Bought in the ^
Continuity, Purpose, Order^Law, Truths the Universe^ Gocl^
after having begun by takingjt for granted, and discovering, to
their profound dismay, that some minds denied it. TJie direction
of mind, as a single force of nature, had been constant since history
began. Its own unity had created a universe the essence of which
\wr abstract^ Truth; the Absolute; God! To Thomas Aquinas,
the universe was still a person; to Spinoza, a substance; to Kant,
Truth was the essence of the *^I"; an innate conviction; a .cate-
gorical imperative; to Poincare, it was a convenience; and to Karl
Pearson, ^medium of exchange.
, The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew
nothing about it; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a
barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the
matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as
marked by the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted.
He knew no more than a firefly about rays or about race or
sex or ennui or a bar of music or a pang of love or
a grain of musk or of phosphorus or conscience or duty
or the force of Euclidian geometry or non-Euclidian or
heat or light -or osmosis or electrolysis or the magnet
or ether or vis inertiae or gravitation or cohesion or
elasticity or surface tension or capillary attraction or
Brownian motion or of some scores, or thousands, or millions
of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy
within and without him; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he
was credibly informed, bore some dozen definitions in the text-
books, mostly contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond
his intelligence; but summed up in the dictum of the last and high-
est science, that Motion seems to be Matter and Matter seems to
be Motion, yet "we are probably incapable of discovering" what
either is. History had no need to ask what either might be; all
it needed to know was the admission of ignorance; the mere fact of
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 457
multiplicity baffling science. Even as to the fact, science disputed,
but radium happened to radiate something that seemed to explode
the scientific magazine, bringing thought, for the time, to a stand-
still; though, in the line of thought-movement in history, radium
was merely jthe next position, famili^^
and his arrow: continuous from the beginning of tjm^. ^c (Dis-
continuous at each successive point. History setjtjdown on the
record' pricked its position on ^.3Eart^
led, or misled, once more.
The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values
his honesty; for, if he cares for his truth s t he is certain to falsify
his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or
"thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now and
then resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear. The
motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannon-
ball seen approaching the observer on a direct line through the
air. One could watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first
violent acceleration in historical times had ended in the catastrophe
of 310. The next swerve of direction occurred towards 1500.
Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, which altered its
values; but all these changes had never altered the continuity.
Only in 1900, the continuity snapped)
Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from '1898, by the Curie's
radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of
British science that the human race without exception had lived
and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century.
The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.
The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
which would not be jt unity but a multiple, J\dams tried to imag-
ine it, and an Education that would fit it./He found himself in a
land where no one had ever penetrated before; where, PldeOftW
an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion
imposed on motion; against which every f^e^nergy of the uni-
458 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
verse revolted; and which^ being merely occasional, resolved itself
back into anarchy; at last. He could not deny tRat the law of
the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure,
especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man;
the perpetual effort of society to establish law^ and the perpetual
revoTt^oTsociety against the law it had established; the perpetual
building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to
force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law,
and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of
the principles of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into prin-
ciples of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead
into thejdespotism^pf artificial order which nature^ abhorred. The
physicists hacTa phrase for it, unintelfigible to the vulgar: "All that
we win is a battle lost in advance with the irreversible phe-
nomena in the background of nature/'
All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He
saw his education complete, and was sorry he ever began it. As
a matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century
education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all
was for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated all share
in the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point
where his responsibility began or ended.
As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit
its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied
all its notions of the perfect. Man . knew it was true because he
made it, and he loved it for the same reason. He sacrificed millions
of lives to acquire his unity, but he achieved it, and justly thought
it a work of art. The woman especially did great things, creating
her deities on a higher level than the male, and, in the end, com-
pelling the man to accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God.
The man's part in his Universe was secondary, but the woman
was at home there, and sacrificed herself without limit to make
it habitable, when man permitted it, as sometimes happened for
THE GRAMMAR OP SCIENCE 459
brief intervals of war and famine; but she could not provide
protection against forces of nature. She did not think of her
universe as a raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge
of a supersensual chaos; she conceived herself and her family as
the centre and flower of an ordered universe which she knew to
be unity because she had made it after the image of her own
fecundity; and this creation of hers was surrounded by beauties
and perfections which she knew to be real because she herself had
imagined them.
Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and cele-
brated her triumph, and the greatest of them sang ic in the noblest
of his verses :
"Alma Venus, coeli subter labentia signa
Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferenteis
Concelebras
Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas,
Nee sine te quidquam dias in luminis oras
Exoritur, neque fit laetum neque amabile quidquam;
Te sociam studeol"
Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their
qwnjnyention, and could no more have done .it of their own
accord than the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the
oyster Inight perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced
into its aperture, it could only perish in face.of the cyclonic hurri-
cane or the volcanic upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual chaos
killed her.
Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on
the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt him-
self in no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it his
duty always to speak with respect of everything that had ever
been thought respectable except an occasional statesman; but
he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it
for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned only
to the search for its channel. He never invented his facts; they
460 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
were furnished him by the only authorities he could find. As for
himself, according to Helmholz, Ernst Mach, and Arthur Bal-
four, he was henceforth to be a conscious ball of vibrating mo-
tions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or
vibration, rolling at the feet of the , Virgin at Chartres or of M.
Poincare in an attic at Paris, a centre of supersensual chaos.
The discovery did not distress him. A solitary man of sixty-five
years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment,
need fret himself little about a few illusions more or less. He should
have learned his lesson fifty years earlier; the times had long passed
when a student could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice
but to march with his world.
Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human
mind has always 'struggled like a frightened bird to escape the
chaos which caged it; how appearing suddenly and inexplicably
out of some unknown and unimaginable void ; passing half its known
life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its
own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion, to
nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last re-
sort, trusting only to instruments and averages after sixty
or seventy years of - growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find
itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should pro-
fess itself pleased by this performance was all that the highest
rules of good breeding could ask; but that it should actually be
satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy.
Satisfied, the future generation "could scarcely think itself, for
even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it
had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to interpret
actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite
series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infi-
nite motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment
into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble
back within its senses and to bar the chaos out, but always as-
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 461
similating bits of it, until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of
unknown forces had fallen on it, which required new mental powers
to control. If this view was correct, the mind could gain nothing
by flight or by fight; it must merge in its supersensual multiverse,
or succumb to it.
CHAPTER XXXII
VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
PARIS after midsummer is a place where only the indus-
trious poor remain, unless they can get away; but Adams
knew no spot where history would be better off, and the
calm of the Champs Elysees was so deep that when Mr. de Witte
was promoted to a powerless dignity, no one whispered that the
promotion was disgrace, while one might have supposed, from the
silence, that the Viceroy Alexeieff had reoccupied Manchuria as
a fulfilment of treaty-obligation. For pnce^ the conspiracy of
silence became crime. Never had so modern and so vital a riddle
been put before Western society, but society shut its eyes. Man-
churia knew every step into war; Japan had completed every
preparation; Alexeieff had collected his army and fleet at Port
Arthur, mounting his siege guns and laying in enormous stores,
ready for the expected attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the
whole East was under war conditions; but Europe knew nothing.
The banks would allow no disturbance; the press said not a
word, and even the embassies were silent. Every anarchist in
Europe buzzed excitement and began to collect in groups, but the
Hotel Ritz was calm, and the Grand Dukes who swarmed there
professed to know directly from the Winter Palace that there
would be no war.
As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed states-
man, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could see that
the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of experience,
he could not understand how the comedy could be so well acted.
Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely asking every
passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their own except
what was directly authorized at St. Petersburg. He could make
nothing of it. He found himself in face of his new problem the
Vis NOVA 463
workings of Russian inertia and he could conceive no way of
forming an opinion how much was real and how much was comedy
had he been in the Winter Palace himself. At times he doubted
whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew, but old diplomatic
training forbade him to admit such innocence.
This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris. On
January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of
atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his
country think as a world-power. No doubt, Japanese diplomacy
had much to do with this alertness, but the immense superiority
of Japanese diplomacy should have been more evident in Europe
than in America, and in any case, could not account for the total
disappearance of Russian diplomacy. A government by inertia
greatly disconcerted study. One was led to suspect that Cassini
never heard from his Government, and that Lamsdorf knew
nothing of his own department; yet no such suspicion could be
admitted. Cassini resorted to transparent blague : " Japan seemed
infatuated even to the point of war! But what can the Japanese
do? As usual, sit on their heels and pray to Buddha !" One of the
oldest and most accomplished diplomatists in the service could
never show his hand so empty as this if he held a card to play;
but he never betrayed stronger resource behind. " If any Japanese
succeed in entering Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive."
The inertia of Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of
diplomatists, deeply interested a student of race-inertia, whose
mind had lost itself in the attempt to invent scales of force.
The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of the
White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the
President. Reticence had no place there. Every one in America
saw that, whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the deci-
sive struggles in American history was pending, and any pretence
of secrecy or indifference was absurd. Interest was acute, and
curiosity intense, for no one knew what the Russian Government
meant or wanted, while war had become a question of days. To
464 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
an impartial student who gravely doubted whether the Czar him-
self acted as a conscious force or an inert weight, the straight-
forward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a standard of
measure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged to lake
the place of his brother Brooks at the Diplomatic Reception im-
mediately after his return home, and the part of proxy included
his supping at the President's table, with Secretary Root on one
side, the President opposite, and Miss Chamberlain between
them. Naturally the President talked and the guests listened;
which seemed, to one who had just escaped from the European
conspiracy of silence, like drawing a free breath after stifling.
Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an amusing talker, and
had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any other man of
great importance in the world, except the Kaiser Wilhelm and Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at table; and this
evening he spared none. With the usual abuse of the quos ego,
common to vigorous statesmen, he said all that he thought about
Russians and Japanese, as well as about Boers and British, with-
out restraint, in full hearing of twenty people, to the entire satis-
faction of his listener; and concluded by declaring that war was
imminent; that it ought to be stopped; that it could be stopped:
"I could do it myself; I could stop it to-morrow!" and he went on
to explain his reasons for restraint.
That he was right, and that, within another generation, his suc-
cessor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow
of doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been
folly when he last supped at the White House in the dynasty of
President Hayes; but the listener cared less for the assertion of
power, than for the vigor of view. The truth was evident enough,
ordinary, even commonplace if one liked, but it was not a truth
of inertia, nor was the method to be mistaken for inert.
Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a
force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as methodi-
cally as mathematically as a demonstration of Euclid, and
Vis NOVA 465
Adams thought that as against any but Russians it would have
lost its opening. Each day counted as a measure of relative energy
on the historical scale, and the whole story made a Grammar of
new Science quite as instructive as that of Pearson.
The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new equi-
librium which would prove the problem in one sense or another,
and the war had no personal value for Adams except that it gave
Hay his last great triumph. He had carried on his long contest
with Cassini so skillfully that no one knew enough to understand
the diplomatic perfection of his work, which contained no error;
but such success is complete only when it is invisible, and his vic-
tpry at last was victory of judgment, not of act. He ppuld do
nothing, and the whole country would have sprung on him had
he tried. Japan and England saved his "open door" and fought
his battle. All that remained for him was to make the peace, and
Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in hand, for Hay's
sake as well as for that of Russia. He thought then that it could
be done in one campaign, for he knew that, in a military sense, the
fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and every one felt
that Hay would inevitably direct it; but the race was close, and
while the war grew every day in proportions, Hay's strength every
day declined.
St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted
his portrait, two steps essential to immortality which he bore
with a certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the
President made him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at
the Exposition; and Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for
whatever use he could suppose himself to serve. He professed the
religion of World's Fairs, without which he held education to be
a blind impossibility; and obeyed Mrs. Hay's bidding the more
readily because it united his two educations in one; but theory and
practice were put to equally severe test at St. Louis. Ten years
had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, anchhe found
everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through
468 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
back to Washington on May 24, and before sailing for Europe,
Adams went over, one warm evening, to bid good-bye on the
garden-porch of the White House. He found himself the first per-
son who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the Exposition for its
beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last.
He left St. Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found
himself again in the town of Cou tances, where the people of Nor-
mandy had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which
architects still admired and tourists visited, for it was thought
singularly expressive of force as well as of grace in the Virgin. On
this Sunday, the Norman world was celebrating a pretty church-
feast the Fete Dieu and the streets were filled with altars
to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the pavements
strewn with paths of leaves and the spring handiwork of nature;
the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene was graceful.
The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition on Sunday, or any
other day, even to American senators who had shut the St. Louis
Exposition to her or for her; and a historical tramp would
gladly have offered a candle, or even a candle-stick in her honor,
if she would have taught him her relation with the deity of the
Senators. The power of the Virgin had been plainly One, em-
bracing all human activity; while the power of the Senate, or its
deity, seemed might one say to be more or less ashamed of
man and his work. The matter had no great interest as far as it
concerned the somewhat obscure mental processes of Senators
who could probably have given no clearer idea than priests of
the deity they supposed themselves to honor if that was indeed
their purpose; but it interested a student of force, curious to
measure its manifestations. Apparently the Virgin or her Son
had no longer the force to build expositions that one cared to
visit, but had the force to close them. The force was still real,
serious, and, at St. Louis, had been anxiously measured in actual
money-value.
* That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate Cham-
Vis NOVA 469
her at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to
buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because
this was the form of force which Adams most abominated. He
had set aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a senti-
ment but as a motive power, which had left monuments widely
scattered and not easily reached. The automobile alone could
unite them in any reasonable sequence, and although the force of
the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed
to have no relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic
cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided
and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the
seeker of history. In his mind the problem offered itself as to
Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew it,
in his own case, to be a formula as precise as s = gt -, if he could
but experimentally prove it. Of the attraction he needed no proof
on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more than
sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others than him-
self. For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led the
automobile and its owner where she would, to her wonderful pal-
aces and chateaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens
and Laon, and a score of others, kindly receiving, amusing, charm-
ing and dazzling her lover, as though she were Aphrodite herself,
worth all else that man ever dreamed. He never doubted her
force, since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, and could not
more dispute its mastery than he could depute the force of gravi-
tatfon_of which he knew nothing but the formula. He was only
too glad to yield himself entirely, not to her charm or to any
sentimentality of religion, but to her mental and physical energy
of creation which had built up these World's Fairs of thirteenth-
century force that turned Chicago and St. Louis pale.
"Both were faiths^and both are gone/' said Matthew Arnold of
the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was
to ask where they had gone. The Virgin had not even altogether
470 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
gone; her fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer
had pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifesta-
tions of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either
of quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less
admit her annihilation as energy.
So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had
found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her
lovers. Her own age had no time-measure. For years past, in-
cited by John La Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling
to the study of her glass at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the
automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that
of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to another
without break. The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one's
road, and one was not fined for running over them too fast. When
the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on, and the six-
teenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin's glass opened
rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in sen-
suous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded
France, broke into Shelley's light dissolved in star-showers thrown,
which had left every remote village strewn with fragments that
flashed like jewels, and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and
forgetfulness. One dared not pass a parish church in Champagne
or Touraine without stopping to look for its window of fragments,
where one's glass discovered the Christ-child in his manger, nursed
by the head of a fragmentary donkey, with a Cupid playing into
its long ears from the balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by
a legless Flemish leibwache, standing on his head with a broken hal-
bert; all invoked in prayer by remnants of the donors and their
children that might have been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio,
in colors as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and
with feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they
had paid for and lost. France abounds in sixteenth-century glass.
Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within
fifty miles contains scores of churches where the student may still
Vis NOVA 471
imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling before the Vir-
gin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith, crying his
culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical sins, weighed
down by the rubbish of sixty-six years* education, and still des-
perately hoping to understand*
He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth cen-
tury had a value of its own, as though the ONE had become sev-
eral, and Unity had counted more than Three, though the Mul-
tiple still showed modest numbers. The glass had gone back to
the Roman Empire and forward to the American continent; it
betrayed sympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare; but the
Virgin was still supreme. At Beauvais in the Church of St. Ste-
phen was a superb tree of Jesse, famous as the work of Engrand
le Prince, about 1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the four-
teen ancestors of the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the
Kings of France, among them Francis I and Henry II, who were
hardly more edifying than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual
as sources of divine purity. Compared with the still more famous
Tree of Jesse at Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must
one declare that Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what
direction? Complexity, Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy,
it might suggest, but what step towards perfection?
One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was
wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate
conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelli-
gent seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two
men looking at a bit of paper stuck In a window. Approaching,
he read that M. de Plehve had been assassinated at St. Peters-
burg. The mad mixture of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippo-
drome and the Renaissance, drove him for refuge into the fascinat-
ing Church of St. Pantaleon near by. Martyrs, murderers, Csesars,
saints and assassins half in glass and half in telegram; chaos
of time, place, morals, forces and motive gave him vertigo.
Had one sat all one's life on the steps of Ara Coeli for this?
47 2 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Was assassination forever to be the last word of Progress? No
one in the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself felt
none; the charming Church with its delightful windows, in its
exquisite absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of
celestial peace than could have been given it by any contrast
short of explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist
had come to his own, but which was he the murderer or the
murdered ?
The Virgin herself never looked so winning so One as in
this scandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she
existed, if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier
than when she was born? TTie^stugendous failure of Christianity
tortured history. The effort for Unity could not be a partial suc-
cess; even alternating Unity resolved itself into meaningless mo-
tion at last. To the tired student, the idea that he must give it
up seemed sheer senility. As long as he could whisper, he would
go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator with
the admission that the creation had taught him nothing except
that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle might
jqr. convenience be taken as equal to something else. Every man
with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine,
has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to in-
vent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas
failed. There, whether finished or not, education stopped. The
formula, once made, could be but verified.
The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old for-
mulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all,
the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no abso-
lute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread
of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits,
one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed move-
ment of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called
Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education, one
sought a common factor for certain definite historical fractions.
Vis NOVA 473
Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were given the
right to state it in his own terms.
Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of the
centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down as
though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own needs
the values of a Dynamic Theory of History.
CHAPTER XXXIII
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by beg-
ging the question: it defines Progress as the develop-
ment and economy of Forces. Further, it defines force
as anything that does, or helps to do work. Man is a force; so is
the sun; so is a mathematical point, though without dimensions
or known existence.
Man commonly begs the question again by taking for granted
that he captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attrac-
tive force to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass,
takes for granted that the forces of nature capture man. The
sum of force attracts; the feeble atom or, molecule called man is
attracted; lie suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the
forces that attract him; his body and his thought are alike their
product; the movement of the forces controls the progress of his
mind, since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge
on his senses, whose sum makes education.
For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature
dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them
when it can; but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory
of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory,
and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart
and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap.
Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis ap-
proaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had
acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets
that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught
him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the
animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 475
merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or
supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of
study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed
his thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure.
Long before history began, his education was cpmplete ? for the
record could not have been started until he had been taught to
record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind
as a reflection ofjiis own unity, containing all forces except him-
self. Either separately^ or in groups, or as a whole, these forces
never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged
the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to
respond, as the forests did, to these attractions. Susceptibility to
the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between them is
the highest science ; their mass is the highest educator. Man always
made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and mea-
suring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made
a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized
as unity and worshipped ;as God. To this day, his attitude to-
wards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to
force a name.
Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He
felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow
or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sought a fetish or a
planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate
use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could
conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He
Baited for the object to teach him its use, or want of use, and the
process was slow. He may have gone on for hundreds of thousands
of years, waiting for Nature to tell him her secrets; and, to his
rivals among the monkeys, Nature has taught no more than at
their start; but certain lines of force were capable of acting on
individual apes, and mechanically selecting types of race or sources
of variation. The individual that responded or reacted to lines of
476 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
new force then was possibly the same individual that reacts on it
now, and his conception of the unity seems never to have changed
in spite of the increasing diversity of forces ; but the theory of varia-
tion is an affair of other science than history, and matters nothing
to dynamics. The individual or the race would be educated on
the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had
not essentially varied down to the year 1900.
To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word
which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether
in detail or mass. Unable to <3efin_Force as a unity, man sym-
bolized it and pursued it, both in himself, and in the infinite, as
philosophy and theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of all
known forces, and its self-introspection necessarily created a science
which had the singular value of lifting his education, at the start,
to the finest, subtlest, and broadest training both in analysis and
synthesis, so that, if language is a test, he must have reached his
highest powers early in his history; while the mere motive re-
mained as simple an appetite for power as the tribal greed which
led him to trap an elephant. Hunger, whether for food or for the
infinite, sets in motion multiplicity and infinity of thought, and
the sure hope of gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life
would lift most minds to effort.
He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and
added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time.
The mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that
one can scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a his-
torian of very exceptional knowledge would venture to say at what
date between 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe was
greatest; but such progress as the world made consisted in econ-
omies of energy rather jhanjn its^development; it was proved In
mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus,
Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of
names which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in coinage,
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 477
which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most barbar-
ous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of ships, or
harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and writing; all of
thencj 'economies of force, sometimes more forceful than the forces
they helped; but the roads were still travelled by the horse, the
ass, the camel, or the slave; the ships were still propelled by sails
or oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region
of applied mechanics, ^en^e metals ^were old.
Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural
forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were little
changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more appa-
rently chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand
years had educated society to feel the vastness of Nature, and the
infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of attrac-
tion had not yet caused economies in its methods of pursuit.
There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the
Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke
down on the steps of Ara Coeli, his patli blocked by the scandalous
failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved complete suc-
cess. In the year 305 the empire had solved the problems of Eu-
rope more completely than they have ever been solved since. The
Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade should, in four hun-
dred years, have put Europe far in advance of the point reached
by modern society in the four hundred years since 1500, when con-
ditions were less simple.
The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic
theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion ofjnjnerals; but
nations are not ruined Beyond a certain point by adverse exchanges,
and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On the con-
trary, the empire developed resources and energies quite astound-
ing. No other four hundred years of history before A.D. 1800 knew
anything like it; and although some of these developments, like
the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and harbors, were rather
478 THE EDUCATION OP HENRY ADAMS
economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe alone the empire
had developed three energies France, England, and Germany
competent to master the world. The trouble seemed rather to be
that the empire developed topjmuc^^ too fast.
A dynamic law Tequlres that two masses nature and man
must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun
and a /comet react on each other, and that any appearance of
stoppage is illusive. The theory seems to exact excess, rather than
deficiency, of action and reaction to account for the dissolution of
the Roman Empire, which should, as a problem of mechanics,
have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the student means to
try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he must assign
values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and in
this case he has them in plain evidence. With the relentless logic
that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which had established
unity on earth, could not help establishing unity in heaven. _It_
was induced .byjts dynamic necessities to economize the gads.
The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has
pointed out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic
theory gladly admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the force
that attracts. The Church points out this force in the Cross, and
history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly asserted its mo-
tive. Good taste forbids saying that Constantine the Great specu-
lated as audaciously as a modern stock-broker on values of which
he knew at the utmost only the volume; or that he merged all un-
certain forces into a single trust, which he enormously over-
capitalized, and forced on the market; but this is the substance of
what Constantine himself said in his Edict of Milan in the year
313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust of State Religions.
Regarded as an Act of Congress, it runs: "We have resolved to
grant to Christians as well as all others the liberty to practise the
religion they prefer, in order that whatever exists of divinity or
celestial power may help and favor us and all who are under our
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 479
government/* The empire j>ursued_j>ower not merely spiritual
but physical in the sense in which Constantine issued his army
order the year before, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc
signo vinces! using the Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his
mind, it was. Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty
years afterwards, Theodosius marched against his rival Eugene
with the Cross for physical champion; and Eugene raised the
image of Hercules to fight for the pagans; while society on both
sides looked on, as though it were 3 boxing-match, to decide a final
test of force between the divine powers. The Church was power-
less to raise the ideal. What is now known as religion affected the
mind of old society but little. The laity, the people, the million,
almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a horse.
No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but
society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was
drawn to the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross had
absorbed all the old occult or fetish-power. The symbol represented
the sum of nature the Energy of modern science and society
believed it to be as real as X-rays; perhaps it was ! The emperors
used it like ^unpowdeHn politics; the physicians used it like rays
injnedicine; the dying clung to it as the quintessence of force, to
protect them from the forces of evil on their road to the next
life.
Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion
djaturbed <eco_nomy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected
the exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a costly
and complicated machine when he cquld hire an occult force at
trifling expense. Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory, down
to a certain point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed
this stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education, and
historians seem now to accept it as the only gain yet made to-
wards scientific history. Great numbers of educated people
perhaps a majority cling to the method still, and practise it
more or less strictly; but, until quite recently, no other was known.
480 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
The only occult power at man's disposal jyas fetish. Against it,
no mechanical force could compete except within narrow limits.
Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was incred-
ibly poor. It knew but one productive energy resembling a modern
machine /the slave. No artificial force of serious value was ap-
plied to production or transportation, and when society developed
itself so rapidly in political and social lines, it had no other means
of keeping its economy on the same level than to extend its slave-
system and its fetish-system to the utmost.
The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as
early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome
fell. The economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced
the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system con-
sumed itself and the empire too, leaving society no resource but
further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate
for the losses and horrors of the failure. For a vicious circle, its
mathematical completeness approached perfection. The dynamic
law of attraction and reaction needed only a Newton to fix it in
algebraic form.
At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden, agri-
cultural, uncommercial Western Empire the poorer and less
Christianized half went to pieces. Society, though terribly
shocked by the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply the
disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed to
protect its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so loud
among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop Augustine
of Hippo a town between Algiers and Tunis was led to
write a famous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar still to
every scholar, in which he defended feebly the mechanical value of
the symbol arguing only that pagan symbols equally failed
but insisted on its spiritual value in the Civitas Dei which had
taken the place of the Civitas Romae in human interest. "Granted
that we have lost all we had ! Have we lost faith ? Have we lost
piety? Have we lost the wealth of the inner man who is rich
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 481
before God? These are the wealth of Christians!" The Civitas
Dei, in its turn, became the sum of attraction for the Western
world, though it also showed the same weakness in mechanics that
had wrecked the Civitas Romae. St. Augustine and his people per-
ished at Hippo towards 430, leaving society in appearance dull to
new attraction.
Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of experi-
menting on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb all the
free thought of the human race. The gods did their work; history
has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged the mind;
taught knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated effort. So little
is known about the mind whether social, racial, sexual or
heritable; whether material or spiritual; whether animal, vegetable
or mineral that history is inclined to avoid it altogether; but
nothing forbids one to admit, for convenience, that it may assimi-
late food like the body, storing new force and growing, like a for-
est, with the storage. The brain has not yet revealed its mysteri-
ous mechanism of gray matter. Never has Nature offered it so
violent a stimulant as when she opened to it the possibility of
sharing infinite power in eternal life, ancj It might well need a
thousand years of prolonged and intense experiment to prove the
value of the motive. During these so-called Middle Ages, the West-
ern mind reacted in many forms, on many sides, expressing its
motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothic architecture,
glass windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and
love, which still aff ect some people as the noblest work of man, so
that, even to-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel
from far countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo
and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova, Chartres, with vague notions abput the
force that created them, but with a certain surprise that a social
mind of such singular energy .and unity should still lurk in their
shadows. " ~
The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly con-
482 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
scious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the simplic-
ity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity and
variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed. The
navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have anni-
hilated in half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or Rome
ever set afloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting rather
recklessly that between the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the Cross
(A.D. 300), no new force affected Western progress, and antiquari-
ans may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the motive influ-
ence, old or new, which raised both. Pyramids and Cross was the
same attraction of power in a future life that raised the dome of
Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens, however much it was
altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in space. Therefore, no
single event has more puzzled historians than the sudden, unex-
plained appearance of a
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