AS
36
A&5
v.2l
COMMEMORATIVE TRIBUTE TO
HENRY ADAMS
By PAUL ELMER MORE
PREPARED FOR
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
ARTS AND LETTERS
1920
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
ARTS AND LETTERS
1922
A Uo'
V. Ll
Copyright, 1922, by
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
THE DE VINNE PRESS
NEW YORK
HENRY ADAMS
BY PAUL E. MORE
By the death of Henry Adams, in
March of 1918, in his eighty-first year,
the Academy lost a member distin
guished in many ways, a man who
reveled in all the riddles of life and
himself left for those curious in the
natural history of the human soul a
riddle not easily solved. In one re
spect he was American by every fiber
of his being. Great-grandson of the
second President of the United States,
grandson of a later President, son of
the Minister to the Court of St.
James's during the trying years of the
Civil War, reared in a tradition of al
most chauvinistic patriotism, he might
ACADEMY NOTES
M52233
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
be regarded as an impersonation of
that New Englandism which pene
trated the bones and marrow of the
national character. And he was,
throughout life, acutely conscious of
his inheritance.
Yet from another side he was con
spicuously un-American ; and of this,
too, he was conscious, and never felt
really at home in the land of his an
cestors. It was a difference in mind,
in thought, which, whatever else may
be said, has not been "the master part
of us," and which was so in Henry
Adams. This is not to say that Amer
ica is mentally sluggish, or has failed
of large accomplishment in scholar
ship and invention and the arts; but
that detached intellectuality which dis
solves the substance of life into a ques
tion, that restless inquisitiveness which
pierces all veils of custom and is only
strengthened the more it is baffled,
that outreaching of "the imperious
ACADEMY NOTES
OF ARTS AND LETTERS
lonely thinking power" which makes
an imprisonment of its very freedom,
the spirit, in a word, which Matthew
Arnold described in his Empedocles, —
these are distinctly not American, and
they distinctly are what characterize
Henry Adams.
The variety of his intellectual
achievement is more remarkable than
their magnitude. As a teacher of his
tory at Harvard for seven years he
was one of the .pioneers of the semi
nary method of study. Besides other
more or less notable works in this field
he published a History of Jefferson's
and Madison's Administrations, mon
umental in bulk, and almost unique in
its combination of documentary re
search, philosophical reflection, and
literary charm. He divulged a scien
tific theory of the periods of human
growth and decline in history which
is strikingly original and, it must be
added, rather sad. For six years he
AND MONOGRAPHS
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
edited the North American Review,
then the most solid magazine of the
country. He wrote two novels, one
of which, Democracy, aroused a good
deal of heated comment by its satirical
picture of Washington political soci
ety. He composed verse, not much in
quantity, but weighted with thought
and emotion and technically more than
respectable. His letters, printed since
his death, show him to have been a
master of the quaint and whimsical in
this delicate genre. Above all he has
left two books of extraordinary qual
ity, his Education and his Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres, one of which is
like the portrait of a naked mind
caught by some art of spiritual pho
tography, the other of which has made
the whole mental and emotional life
of the twelfth century a vehicle for
the same insatiate personality. This,
however one may judge the individual
works, is a record scarcely paralleled
ACADEMY NOTES
OF ARTS AND LETTERS
by the production of any other Amer
ican author.
In the long run interest probably
will center on the last two works, the
Education and the Mont-Saint-Michel.
By education Adams meant not at all
the mere accumulation of knowledge,
of which, nevertheless, he had abun
dance, but that insight into the nature
of things which should enable a man
to know what the world is and what
he himself is, and so to adjust his life
to the forces that play upon it. In that
sense education came to our Acade
mician slowly, if it came at all, and
the pages of his autobiography are a
continual, and sometimes a bitter,
complaint over the fact that he, the
heir of all the ages and of all the
Adamses, should be held at bay by the
baffling sphinx of existence. He sent
his intellect to work in the various
fields of learning of which the cen
tury was so proud — history, science,
AND MONOGRAPHS
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
politics, art, religion — seeking an
answer to the question everywhere put
to him : Why are you here, and who
am I who set you here? Only at the
end of his life did he read the riddle,
and for those who read his books left
another riddle to solve.
Standing before the great dynamo
at the Paris Exposition, in 1900, he
thought he saw in that wheel, revolv
ing with such vertiginous speed, so
terribly silent, so majestically regular
in its motion, a symbol of the ruthless,
impersonal force which science discov
ers at the center of the universe :
"Among the thousand symbols of ulti
mate energy, the dynamo was not so
human as some, but it was the most
expressive." Then from this inhuman
sign he turned, by a kind of revulsion
of feeling, to what \vas most opposite
to it in every respect. He wrote his
book to show that the Virgin Mother
of God, in whose honor the cathe-
ACADEMY NOTES
OF ARTS AND LETTERS
7
dral of Chartres had been raised and
adorned, was the real object of wor
ship in the Middle Ages just because
she was the symbol and warrant of
something inconsequent, whimsically
merciful, contemptuous of law, hu
man, feminine, in the governing of the
world. That he should have turned
from one to the other of these forces
is not strange, but that he should have
found it consonant to adore them to
gether is a feat of audacious thinking,
if not of education.
AND MONOGRAPHS
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