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The Education of Henry Adams

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Title: The Education of Henry Adams

Author: Henry Adams

Editor: Henry Cabot Lodge


        
Release date: January 1, 2000 [eBook #2044]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Original publication: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2044

Credits: Produced by Richard Fane


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS ***




Produced by Richard Fane









The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams





THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

        CONTENTS
        EDITOR'S PREFACE
        PREFACE
     I. QUINCY (1838-1848)
    II. BOSTON (1848-1854)
   III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
    IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
     V. BERLIN (1858-1859)
    VI. ROME (1859-1860)
   VII. TREASON (1860-1861)
  VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861)
    IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
     X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
    XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
   XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863)
  XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
   XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
    XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868)
   XVI. THE PRESS (1868)
  XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
 XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
   XIX. CHAOS (1870)
    XX. FAILURE (1871)
   XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
  XXII. CHICAGO (1893)
 XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898)
  XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
   XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
  XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901)
 XXVII. TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
  XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
   XXX. VIS INERTIAE (1903)
  XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
 XXXII. VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
 XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904)
  XXXV. NUNC AGE (1905)


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 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 philosophy 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, subject 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 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
1910, 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 requested
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 preferred
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 XXXIV, 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
"Education" 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 students 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;
contemptible 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 fellows;
let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my unworthiness; 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
eighteenth century, and has been commonly thought to have had more
influence 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
necessary, 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 experience,
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
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 elsewhere, 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
obstacles, 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
geometrical 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



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 sometimes 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 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 moderately interested in learning
how their neighbors have managed 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 1, 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 sickroom 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
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
childhood 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 exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. 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
responsibility; 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 life as
it was given; accepting its local standards without a difficulty, 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 nature; the boy
looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; 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 sensibility--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 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 became 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
endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing,
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 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 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 with pleasure 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 growing 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-grandfather, who
had died a dozen years before his own birth: he took for granted that
any great-grandfather of his must have always been good, and his
enemies wicked; but he divined his great-grandfather's character from
his own. Never for a moment did he connect 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 President,"
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 restraint. 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 comforts, 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 President'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 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 reconciled 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 diplomatic
remnants; and neither of the two eighteenth-century styles--neither
English Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize--was comfortable 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. 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. From
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 master 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. Naturally 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 bottom of the long
staircase which led up to the door of the President'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 interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an
old gentleman 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, somewhere 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 malevolent 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 intelligence. He had shown no
temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, 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 for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt
instinctive respect. 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 hatcheries; 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 inherited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, the
little boy Henry conscientiously 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 eastward 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. Nothing 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 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 citizens on the main aisle, and Presidents or their
equivalents on the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child:
"You'll 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 suggested 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
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 Washington 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
Consul'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
Americans, 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 Romney 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 judgment 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 descendants 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 Senator 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 miserable
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
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 venerable
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 Boston 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
accepted 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 atmosphere 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 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 Washington, 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 dramatic, 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 service a character that
left an overwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many
great functions--funerals and festival--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 oratory, such as only
an admirable orator and scholar could create; too good for a
ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but already 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? Even then he felt that something was
wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston. Quincy had always been
right, for Quincy represented a moral principle--the principle of
resistance to Boston. His 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 prejudices, 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 1,
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 Frothingham, 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
grandmother; 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
administration; support which, as a social consequence, led to the
marriage 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 European 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 inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal
relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter, and
slept through their uncle's sermons, without once thinking 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 conditions, 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. Between 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 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 complete 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-President, 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 generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all,
to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This
was their education. 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 to 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
education, 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 Adams possessed the
only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a
hundred years, every newspaper scribbler had, 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 mental
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 inferiority, 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
imaginative or oratorical--still less mathematical; but it worked with
singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery
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 Boston ministers of the same
school, would have commanded distinction 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 Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but
Mr. Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian.
Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence, especially in
medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science. 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-adjustment--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
necessarily 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 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 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, numbered 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 opposite; 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. Undoubtedly 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
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 different 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 Everett 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 sacrificed 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 followers 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
ambitious of all, and the most hungry for what used to be called polite
society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in Boston.
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 Vernon 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. Sumner was the boy's ideal of
greatness; the highest product of nature 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 himself 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 serious; the Free Soil Party took
itself quite seriously; and they were habitual because Mr. Adams had
undertaken to edit a newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen, who
came to discuss its policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams
was editing 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 Massachusettensis, Henry
had shown very little consciousness of punctuation; but the boy
regarded this part of school life only as a warning, if he ever grew up
to write dull discussions in the newspapers, 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 represent 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 succession 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 commonly 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 less
the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay, was
the world which he was to fit. Had he known Europe he would have
learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe, Guizot, and de
Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert 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
Concord. 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 million tons of coal, and
might be using nearly a million steam-horsepower, just beginning to
make itself felt. All experience since the creation of man, all divine
revelation or human science, conspired 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."

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 virtuous, useful,
unselfish life, which they held 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 religion 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 conditions 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 politics; but in
politics a certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
philosophy no one protested. 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 problems, 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 philosophy were not
worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no
other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more
literary and political. As the children 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 willing to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to
time; while Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good
listener, 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, especially 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 appeared, but the children took
possession of Dickens and Thackeray 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 mental indolence of history. So too, he read shelves of
eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of
Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined.
Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; 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
educated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
education. Sumner, 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 atmosphere 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 literature. 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 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
children, 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 generation 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 negative. 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.

  In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the
prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days,
from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps 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: Mathematics, 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 companions.
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 history 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. 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 and
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 did 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 he 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
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 superiority 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 depressed 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 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 going
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.

  One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and
the Boston Massacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an
eighteenth-century politician, and afterwards only a possibility;
beyond 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 railroad 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 suggestion 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. 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 reeking
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
understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he
understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a
horror; 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 population hung in the
atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple,
but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as an
attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers, of
pavements, of forms; the looseness, 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 softness 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
hundred, if by accident he should happen to live so long.

  His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the
Senate, 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-Presidency 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 much a
vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The statesman of all periods
was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity was less offensive than
familiarity--on the platform as in the pulpit--and Southern pomposity,
when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and
childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the
Websterian or Conklinian 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 socially; 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
before 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 President 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 paddock 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, but any one could be President, and some
very shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators,
Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.

  Every 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 pilgrimages 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. To the
New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were
connected as part of the law of order or divine 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.

  Luckily boys accept 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 Mount
Vernon always remained where it was, with no practicable road to reach
it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was only Quincy in 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 singularly 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
power 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 surroundings 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
statesmanship. America and he began, at the same time, to become aware
of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery. 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 185l.

  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 subordinates 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 in which he was too
good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles 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 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 Senator. 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 himself 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 wondered what Caleb Cushing meant by
calling Mr. Sumner a "one-eyed abolitionist." Truly the difference in
meaning with the phrase "one-ideaed abolitionist," which was Mr.
Cushing's actual expression, is not 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 bystanders, 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 crepe 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, the house they want to live in, the
profession they mean to practise. Always he felt himself somewhere
else; perhaps in Washington 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, mathematical 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 enormous
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, including
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 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 twentieth century, he wondered whether,
on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to
that of the year 1. 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 1 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 education 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 English or European boy for whom
schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as
afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible education were
wasted in doing imperfectly 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 Gorhams had gone to
Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever
done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom,
social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation
in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort,
but no one took Harvard 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 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 mesure; 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 water-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 debated whether in
fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but,
disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably 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 distinguished 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
education, 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 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 passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical;
singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not
hostile 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 criticism. 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 appeared satisfied to stand alone. It
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
enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as
little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some 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 mortal 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 contact 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
command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was
simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England
student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant
he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative 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 training; he
could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive 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 authority over his own staff. Lee was
a gentleman of the old school, and, as every one knows, gentlemen of
the old school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but
this was not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence
of political 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 endurance of North and South, this
momentary contact with Southern 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
limitations, 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 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 Virginian of a century
before; but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his
great-grandfather than to that of a railway 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 collegians 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 Winfield Scott in the force then being organized
against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance,
which flattered Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could
do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a
certain 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
purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom 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-meetings by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found
himself 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 education failed
lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; 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 teaching 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
Glacial Period and Paleontology, 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 English composition a hesitating
approval; but in that branch, as 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 of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly
accurate gauge of 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 survived
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 directors, and its railway magnates. Thackeray
and Dickens followed Balzac in scratching and biting the unfortunate
middle class with savage ill-temper, 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 held its coal and iron well in
hand, but the satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they
were agreed that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a
danger to England, they turned to Germany because at that moment
Germany was neither economical nor military, 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 Shakespeare--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 valuable 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
exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As
practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith
rather than towards Boston where he properly belonged; 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 Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow
scope; and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel
uncertainty 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 penetrate 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; perhaps--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 encouragement 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, 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 social
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 acquaintance 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 before, or would have known in any
case, and contact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the last education
these young men needed. 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 friendships 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 friendship. Life is a narrow valley,
and the roads 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 together.
Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a 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 cultivated 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 languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it
helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. The
Bostonian 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 College for the sake of
its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite
as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success 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 European, nor even wholly
Yankee; his admirers were few, and critics his many; perhaps his worst
weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness; but his ambitions,
social or intellectual, were necessarily cheap even though they might
be negative. Afraid of such serious risks, and still more afraid of
personal ridicule, he seldom 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 improvement 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
Societies 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 him 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 had very little 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 instinct 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--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, 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 astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of
the college permitted 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 representatives 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 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 representative--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 conspicuous in the
function. Unlike the Orators at regular Commencements, 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 forgot 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 men, whom he was trying to represent,
expressed. Another comment threw more light on the effect of the
college education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's
"perfect self-possession." Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College
gave nothing 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 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 Council of Trent or the British Parliament than have
acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala audience of the
Hasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard
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, education, Henry Adams never knew. He was
ready to stand up before any audience in America or Europe, with nerves
rather steadier for the excitement, but whether he should ever have
anything 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. Being 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, so much 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 temptations 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 observed 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, 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 the 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 teaching 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 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 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 drearier picture of a
Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee-room in November murk,
followed instantly by the passionate delights of Chester and the
romance of red-sandstone architecture. Millions of Americans have felt
this succession of emotions. 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 Nell
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
horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never
had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast
between this dense, smoky, impenetrable 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 practical
education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away
from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.

  Had 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. London was still London. A
certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy, arrogant,
purse-proud, but not 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. History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr.
Johnson, in 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 structures 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. He liked it
best when he hated it. Education began at the end, or perhaps would end
at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century,
and the 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 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 strongest and fullest flavors that ever
touched the young man's palate; but he might as well have drunk out his
excitement in old Malmsey, 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 suspecting
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, untouristed--to retain the sense of
reality. As a taste or a smell, it was education, especially because it
lasted barely ten years longer; but it was education only sensual. He
never dreamed of trying to educate himself to the Descent 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 misunderstandings. 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 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 advisers;
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 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 Prussian 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 whatever 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 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 purpose in
life.

  It was not merely the language, though three months passed in
such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and
this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never
by any chance would come in contact with German 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
experiment 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 experience of
education he tried the German high school. The experiment 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 bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only
beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from discipline,
activity scarcely 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
Linden. German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and
German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bismarck 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 energies 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
education 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 systemless American with horror. The
arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that
the memory endured was a 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 machine 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 educational needs of
the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood; the children
were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such, and of a class suspected
of sympathy and concern in the troubles 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 illogical 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 German student life was on the
whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, but though
nothing except small fragments 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 afternoons
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 indifference, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams
replied simply that he loathed Beethoven; 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 mathematicians
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, suddenly 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 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, accidental, 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
Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily
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 educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at
last, April came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen, 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 Thuringen lasted four-and-twenty hours. By the end
of the first walk, his three companions--John Bancroft, James J.
Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard College like
himself--were satisfied with what they had seen, and when they sat down
to rest on the spot where Goethe had written--

                "Warte nur! balde
          Rubest 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 lighthearted 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 possibly right. There was
nothing to study in Dresden, and no education 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 continued the study of the language. Possibly one might
learn something more by accident, as one had learned something of
Beethoven. 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 sentiment; the musical and
metaphysical abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for
practical affairs. At that time everyone 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
religious and social history, her economical interests, her military
geography, her political convenience, had always tended to eccentric
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
between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing
men who stayed too long at the points of contact. Suddenly the Emperor
Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised a confused 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 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 disturbed 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 neighbors who had found no way of settling this
question since the days of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did better
to discard the attempt 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 concentrations, 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 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, wilful, or full of will, energetic,
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 woman had ever 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 war. 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 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 hopelessly 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 equivalents. 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
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 Mals, 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 picturesque 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
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 graduated. 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 knowledge, 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 equivalent 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 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 whatever
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. The habit of expression leads to
the search for something to express. Something 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
betrayed 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
naturally 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 before 1870 was seductive beyond
resistance. The month of May, 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 sorcery. 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 one, 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
man 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 conundrum after conundrum in his educational path, which
seemed unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed
insoluble but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle 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 passage 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 Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
gained by Gibbon--or all the historians since--towards explaining the
Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm remained intact. Two
great experiments of Western civilization 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.

  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, sitting 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 greatest 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
coming 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 consolation, derived from history and
statistics, that most citizens of Rome seemed to be the better for
guillotining. Only by slow 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
morning's murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place, as a
middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards, 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 teaching, 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 fragmentary; 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
offered, 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 accidental education, whatever its
economical return might be, was prodigiously successful as an object in
itself. Everything conspired 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 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, realized, capitalized, it
had also a certain value as a lesson in something, 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 spectacle, 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 essential 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, 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 history he might, like the
rest of the world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not
understand. 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, Garibaldi 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 education, seemed to teach the extreme
complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this from
a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced,
simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian
brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and

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