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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
dificulty, 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 cofortable 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 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 a 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 presence 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 revolutionary clamor, among
the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to
remember that simplicity is complex.
Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to
stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered
two or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided
Paris, and had wanted no French influence in his education. He
disapproved of France in the lump. A certain knowledge of the
language one must have; enough to order dinner and buy a theatre
ticket; but more he did not seek. He disliked the Empire and the
Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he disliked most the
French mind. To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long
list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once
for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France was
not serious, and he was not serious in going there.
He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he
felt quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he
disapproved. Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but,
as a matter of fact, several thousand Americans passed much of
their time there on this understanding. They sought to take share
in every function that was open to approach, as they sought
tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams
did like the rest. All thought of serious education had long
vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms, without even
aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better in
acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and
Philippe's and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre,
and the Varietes and the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant,
Rose Cheri and Gil Perez, and other lights of the stage. His
friends were good to him. Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became
familiar. In a month or six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of
it; but he studied nothing, entered no society, and made no
acquaintance. Accidental education went far in Paris, and one
picked up a deal of knowledge that might become useful; perhaps,
after all, the three months passed there might serve better
purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did
not intend it -- did not think it -- and looked at it as a
momentary and frivolous vacation before going home to fit himself
for life. Therewith, after staying as long as he could and
spending all the money he dared, he started with mixed emotions
but no education, for home.
CHAPTER VII
TREASON (1860-1861)
WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether
fortune or fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any
of his known antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of
law and to vote for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.
He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which
played with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The
simile is none too strong. Not one man in America wanted the
Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted
secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their
occupations in peace. Not one, however clever or learned, guessed
what happened. Possibly a few Southern loyalists in despair might
dream it as an impossible chance; but none planned it.
As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics,
quite heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted
away. The prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father
asked a malicious question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he
hinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son
to act as private secretary during the winter in Washington, as
though any young man who could afford to throw away two winters
on the Civil Law could afford to read Blackstone for another
winter without a master. The young man was beyond satire, and
asked only a pretext for throwing all education to the east wind.
November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been from
earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does
the uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail
wreck of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November
seemed temperate before the chill of a Boston January.
This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood
apart from other memories as lurid beyond description. Although
no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the
Republicans organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in a
form military in all things except weapons. Henry reached home in
time to see the last of these processions, stretching in ranks of
torches along the hillside, file down through the November night;
to the Old House, where Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress,
received them, and, let them pretend what they liked, their air
was not that of innocence.
Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed
his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked,
and started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed
since his last visit, but very little had changed. As in 1800 and
1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same
forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms,
and sloughs for roads. The Government had an air of social
instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right
of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession
was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from.
The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December,
1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far
as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in Philadelphia
in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in Washington.
Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in
1860-61, no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all
the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was
surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly
that the knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly
greater than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master
a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after
Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern
talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself
seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and
ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in
mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
hallucination -- haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent
morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously
ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were
mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree
rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains
of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like
oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson
of the way in which excess of power worked when held by
inadequate hands.
This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was
paradox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles
Sumner's chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance,
and he stood a living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams
had come for a new education, and the school was seriously,
honestly, taken by most of the world, including Europe, as proper
for the purpose, although the Sioux Indians would have taught
less mischief. From such contradictions among intelligent people,
what was a young man to learn?
He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to
teach or to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided,
he was too glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the
education of a reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson
from the Confederate school except to keep away from it. Thus, at
one sweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac
was shut off; it was overshadowed by the cotton planters, from
whom one could learn nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker,
and treason.
Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
example; first of all, on his New England surroundings.
Republican houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams
aimed to create a social centre for New Englanders. They took a
house on I Street, looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out
towards Georgetown -- the Markoe house -- and there the private
secretary began to learn his social duties, for the political
were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies of the Capitol. He
had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly, but he knew
of no one who knew more.
The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the
boy's oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady
men, well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue
-- men whom one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or
not, bore the stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one
exception, and perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the
New Englander's strength was his poise which almost amounted to a
defect. He offered no more target for love than for hate; he
attracted as little as he repelled; even as a machine, his motion
seemed never accelerated. The character, with its force or
feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to the core; one was it --
had been run in the same mould.
There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself
to Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few
other men born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to
Henry J. Raymond, who came to view the field for the New York
Times, and who was a man of the world. The average Congressman
was civil enough, but had nothing to ask except offices, and
nothing to offer but the views of his district. The average
Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say, being
always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his
own importance.
Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence
of only two men -- Sumner and Seward.
Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and,
after his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite
recovered its tone; but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary
existence as Senator had most to do with his development. No man,
however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or
Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic
stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of
attitude forever, as though they mesmerized the subject. Yet even
among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank
South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or
Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became
Shakespearian and bouffe -- as Godkin used to call it -- like
Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at
least the merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly
thought, as Webster had thought before him, that his great
services and sacrifices, his superiority in education, his
oratorical power, his political experience, his representative
character at the head of the whole New England contingent, and,
above all, his knowledge of the world, made him the most
important member of the Senate; and no Senator had ever saturated
himself more thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the body.
Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one
Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and
still more seldom likes to be told of it. Even the greatest
Senators seemed to inspire little personal affection in each
other, and betrayed none at all. Sumner had a number of rivals
who held his judgment in no high esteem, and one of these was
Senator Seward. The two men would have disliked each other by
instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was created
only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the
faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of
either. That the public service must suffer was certain, but what
were the sufferings of the public service compared with the risks
run by a young mosquito -- a private secretary -- trying to buzz
admiration in the ears of each, and unaware that each would
impatiently slap at him for belonging to the other? Innocent and
unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even in a nursery, the
private secretary courted both.
Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose
business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a
professional kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on
reaching Washington, was that the President-elect, Abraham
Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for his Secretary of State, and
that Seward was to be the medium for communicating his wishes to
his followers. Every young man naturally accepted the wishes of
Mr. Lincoln as orders, the more because he could see that the new
President was likely to need all the help that several million
young men would be able to give, if they counted on having any
President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for
the first meeting with the new Secretary of State.
Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed
to be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been
Senator since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had
separated him from the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry
light of the first Free Soil faith, the ways of New York politics
Thurlow Weed had not won favor; but the fierce heat which welded
the Republican Party in 1856 melted many such barriers, and when
Mr. Adams came to Congress in December, 1859, Governor Seward
instantly renewed his attitude of family friend, became a daily
intimate in the household, and lost no chance of forcing his
fresh ally to the front.
A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the
family, and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to
watch him as carefully as one generally watches men who dispose
of one's future. A slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise
macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and
clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual
cigar, offered a new type -- of western New York -- to fathom; a
type in one way simple because it was only double -- political
and personal; but complex because the political had become
nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the
features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off
restraint, or seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the
world he threw it off, like a politician, for effect. In both
cases he chose to appear as a free talker, who loathed pomposity
and enjoyed a joke; but how much was nature and how much was
mask, he was himself too simple a nature to know. Underneath the
surface he was conventional after the conventions of western New
York and Albany. Politicians thought it unconventionality.
Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams thought it
charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who,
though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He
noticed that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was
large; he generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship;
he did not require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual
-- almost singular and quite eccentric -- he had some means,
unknown to other Senators, of producing the effect of
unselfishness.
Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be
rigid, but the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple
enough when it chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had
been attacked in succession as no better than political
mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in his standard history, went so far
as to echo with approval the charge that treachery was hereditary
in the family. Any Adams had at least to be thick-skinned,
hardened to every contradictory epithet that virtue could supply,
and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; but all must
have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to
national interests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced
to choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his father had done,
as his father had followed the steps of John Adams, and no doubt
thereby earned his epithets.
The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the
edge of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his
masters on their various paths he made no pretence of guessing;
even at that age he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing
motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which
he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always matter of
simple-minded surprise. Critics who know ultimate truth will
pronounce judgment on history; all that Henry Adams ever saw in
man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and he never saw quite
so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one knows the
story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and the
conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion
made the sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and
concentrated education.
Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the
Government, they must make sure of a government to administer,
and that this chance depended on the action of Virginia. The
whole ascendancy of the winter wavered between the effort of the
cotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the new
President to keep Virginia in. Governor Seward representing the
Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr. Adams took the
lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary knew, the
party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty,
of dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open
eyes. As Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after
Mr. Adams and he had made their speeches: "If there's no
secession now, you and I are ruined."
They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries
had nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that
side a secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The
sudden arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and
the language of his inaugural address, were the final term of the
winter's tactics, and closed the private secretary's interest in
the matter forever. Perhaps he felt, even then, a good deal more
interest in the appearance of another private secretary, of his
own age, a young man named John Hay, who lighted on LaFayette
Square at the same moment. Friends are born, not made, and Henry
never mistook a friend except when in power. From the first
slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay as
a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4
when Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon new
shoulders, and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He had
tried to make himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed
to him portentous, acting in secret as newspaper correspondent,
cultivating a large acquaintance and even haunting ballrooms
where the simple, old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant even
in the atmosphere of conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to
nothing for education, because no one could teach; all were as
ignorant as himself; none knew what should be done, or how to do
it; all were trying to learn and were more bent on asking than on
answering questions. The mass of ignorance in Washington was
lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top to bottom,
broke down.
From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military
figure that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked
it, or was it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young
Adams been told that his life was to hang on the correctness of
his estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He saw Mr.
Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural
Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He
saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind,
absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid
gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any
other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of
becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a
private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
private secretary in the least fit for his business would have
thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much
education as the new President but that all the education he
could get would not be enough.
As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in
March were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who
thought they knew something were more in error than those who
knew nothing. Education was matter of life and death, but all the
education in the world would have helped nothing. Only one man in
Adams's reach seemed to him supremely fitted by knowledge and
experience to be an adviser and friend. This was Senator Sumner;
and there, in fact, the young man's education began; there it
ended.
Going over the experience again, long after all the great
actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In
the effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would
have liked much to know whether he could have helped it. He had
necessarily followed Seward and his father; he took for granted
that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; he
supposed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled
all personal doubts. He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator
Sumner privately denounced the course, regarded Mr. Adams as
betraying the principles of his life, and broke off relations
with his family.
Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the
profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are
sudden strains that permanently warp the mind. He cared little or
nothing about the point in discussion; he was even willing to
admit that Sumner might be right, though in all great emergencies
he commonly found that every one was more or less wrong; he liked
lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he
felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened
a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life lasted, he
found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political
instinct, with out waiting further experiment -- as he took for
granted that arsenic poisoned -- the rule that a friend in power
is a friend lost.
On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or
afterwards, but his education -- for good or bad -- made an
enormous stride. One has to deal with all sorts of unexpected
morals in life, and, at this moment, he was looking at hundreds
of Southern gentlemen who believed themselves singularly honest,
but who seemed to him engaged in the plainest breach of faith and
the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they did not disturb his
education. History told of little else; and not one rebel
defection -- not even Robert E. Lee's -- cost young Adams a
personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.
This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to
him hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March,
1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led
to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering
between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,
helps nothing. Washington was a dismal school. Even before the
traitors had flown, the vultures descended on it in swarms that
darkened the ground, and tore the carrion of political patronage
into fragments and gobbets of fat and lean, on the very steps of
the White House. Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or
was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or
Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public.
Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the
young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of
such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and
ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South,
before the country could recover its balance and movement. Henry
was a helpless victim, and, like all the rest, he could only wait
for he knew not what, to send him he knew not where.
With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing
to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return
with his father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and,
with childlike docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of
Horace Gray in Court Street, to begin again: "My Lords and
Gentlemen"; dozing after a two o'clock dinner, or waking to
discuss politics with the future Justice. There, in ordinary
times, he would have remained for life, his attempt at education
in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed.
CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY (1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his
Minister to England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone
back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced
many centuries before: Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a
brief day; the Common Law prolonged its shadowy existence for a
week. The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished in
April, 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a
lawless world, to begin a new life without education at all. They
asked few questions, but if they had asked millions they would
have got no answers. No one could help. Looking back on this
moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could only
shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one
of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be
spared from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again
without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew
himself about to be in his new role, he was less ridiculous than
his betters. He was at least no public official, like the
thousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded
their jealousies and intrigues on the President. He was not a
vulture of carrion -- patronage. He knew that his father's
appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal
friendship; he did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed
it, or the reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit;
but he could have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for
them, the strongest and most decisive being that, in his opinion,
Mr. Adams had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his
chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard
to find a fit appointment in the list of possible candidates,
except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well as this
experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of
fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than
Senator Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee,
was likely to give him. In the family history, its members had
taken many a dangerous risk, but never before had they taken one
so desperate.
The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one,
except perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary
of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the
Executive appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had
applied for the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally
known as Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the
post, or of helping the Minister. The Assistant Secretary was
inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially
useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps
he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too much of
Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.
The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path
by giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote
letters, it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one,
at that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people.
The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except
in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst
and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams
into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be
beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had
time to watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House
in the April evenings and march southward, quietly enough, with
the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few
signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence
before being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the
furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of
fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as
the solitary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old
Cunard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for
Liverpool. This time the pitcher of education had gone to the
fountain once too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man
had got to meet a hostile world without defence -- or arms.
The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May
1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have
enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with
one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was
alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams
the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in
London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters of
introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra
burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate person in the
party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never
dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy
was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered how
his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter,
1778, on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old
son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of
adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered
how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with himself, a
baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar
Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John
Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought it natural
that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also,
with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that
he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend on
Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams
had no friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he
asked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his
father and grandfather had done before him, without a murmur.
This was a lofty view, and for him answered his objects, but it
bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the young man
realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal. He modestly
thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer, and judged
his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time
America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order. Her
representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in
1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private
secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the
Court and Parliament of Great Britain.
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If
they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they
stood with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him
quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same
ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of
Cassius M. Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's
education profited less than the private secretary's, Cassius
Clay as a teacher having no equal though possibly some rivals. No
young man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from
such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious
that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the
Government; fewest of all among those who were in it. At home,
for the most part, young men went to the war, grumbled and died;
in England they might grumble or not; no one listened.
Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He
never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his
tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence --
of talking without meaning -- is never effaced. He had to begin
it at once. He was already an adept when the party landed at
Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a
family of early Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena
of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord
Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar Palmerston laugh at
figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance
in the Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the
ceremony.
Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the
affair of history and their errors concern historians. The errors
of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a
large part of his education. He thought on May 12 that he was
going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest
profession. For a hundred years the chief effort of his family
had aimed at bringing the Government of England into intelligent
cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His father
was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief
apparent obstacle to good understanding. As for the private
secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively
English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England. He
supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery
family, to be welcome everywhere in the British Islands.
On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of
a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of
Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn -- the sooner the
better -- that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May,
1861, no one in England -- literally no one -- doubted that
Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all
were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated
Palmerston who, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the
severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently
held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared.
Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the rebel
emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency
before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of
the British Government in advance. The recognition of
independence would then become an understood policy; a matter of
time and occasion.
Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension -- a
sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow.
Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The
chances were great that the whole family would turn round and go
home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves
of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long
leisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation
had his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be
-- unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for
his -- trifling though it were -- was proved by his unreflecting
confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that his
father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a
subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over
several generations, he could not certainly point out another who
could have stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this
long day, and tedious journey to London, without once thinking of
the possibility that his father might make a mistake. Whatever
the Minister thought, and certainly his thought was not less
active than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His
manner was the same as ever; his mind and temper were as
perfectly balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve twitched.
The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden
could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the
private secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his
father as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus
into Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst
of a London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he
preferred to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the
waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for breakfast, rather than ask a
question or express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously,
was too appalling to face. Had he known it better, he would only
have thought it worse.
Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond
retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of
circumstances, a newcomer in London society needs years to
establish a position, and Minister Adams had not a week or an
hour to spare, while his son had not even a remote chance of
beginning. Politically the prospect looked even worse, and for
Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but for the
Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he
stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one
of the luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he
escaped. The blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed
over him. Lord John Russell had acted -- had probably intended to
act -- kindly by him in forestalling his arrival. The blow must
have fallen within three months, and would then have broken him
down. The British Ministers were a little in doubt still -- a
little ashamed of themselves -- and certain to wait the longer
for their next step in proportion to the haste of their first.
This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor.
The father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's
was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles
Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as
enemies; the only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred
and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling
with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street; and
the British Government, well used to a liberal unpopularity
abroad, even when officially rude liked to be personally civil.
All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a
corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing
in especial to complain of; his position was good while it
lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had
no such compensations. Brought over in order to help his father,
he could conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was
clear that his father had got to help him. To him, the Legation
was social ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known.
Entire solitude in the great society of London was doubly
desperate because his duties as private secretary required him to
know everybody and go with his father and mother everywhere they
needed escort. He had no friend, or even enemy, to tell him to be
patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have broken out
with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools as
well as of sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do
it at once, for his father would never so much need help again.
In fact he never gave his father the smallest help, unless it
were as a footman, clerk, or a companion for the younger
children.
He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common
in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most
secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but
useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son
could go only as an invited guest, the most instructive
conversation he ever heard among the young men of his own age who
hung about the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel
chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, mon cher!" No
one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also
slow to assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If
the American Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian
Ambassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be
in trouble to-morrow. It would all come in the day's work. There
was nothing professional in worry. Empires were always tumbling
to pieces and diplomats were always picking them up.
This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff.
His social education was more barren still, and more trying to
his vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him
writhe with torture. He never forgot the first two or three
social functions he attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in Stratton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure
of a window and hoped that no one noticed him; another was a
garden-party given by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of
Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister and Mrs.
Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till every one
else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to
playing leap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next
thirty years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who,
singularly enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another
nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager
of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and
forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled
nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador
for partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the
world turned to ashes.
When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his
solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the
Times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for
Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this
is history and can be read by public schools if they choose; but
the curious and unexpected happened to the Legation, for the
effect of Bull Run on them was almost strengthening. They no
longer felt doubt. For the next year they went on only from week
to week, ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more
than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to see them
go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.
So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or
finished in the character of private secretary; and as about to
begin, without further experiment, a final education in the ranks
of the Army of the Potomac where he would find most of his
friends enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this
idea uppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn,
and began the winter. Any winter in London is a severe trial;
one's first winter is the most trying; but the month of December,
1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a
glutton of gloom.
One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the
absence of the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit,
Reuter's telegram announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell
from a British mail-steamer was brought to the office. All three
secretaries, public and private were there -- nervous as wild
beasts under the long strain on their endurance -- and all three,
though they knew it to be not merely their order of departure --
not merely diplomatic rupture -- but a declaration of war --
broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end.
They saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for
its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.
They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it,
is told in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster
who was one of the Fryston party. The moment was for him the
crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries it was
merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they
were a military outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned
position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort
sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog was
never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Londoner
lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source of
comfort denied to them -- he should not be private secretary
long.
He was mistaken -- of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same
mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing
but one of many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round
hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal to
him which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these,
and to him the most important, was to put an end forever to the
idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an independent and free
citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he had kept up his
relations with the American press. He had written pretty
frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with
the two or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News,
the Star, the weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them
news and views that should have a certain common character, and
prevent clash. He had even gone down to Manchester to study the
cotton famine, and wrote a long account of his visit which his
brother Charles had published in the Boston Courier.
Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and instantly came
back upon him in the most crushing shape possible -- that of a
long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did
not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the
Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he
instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe
Parkes, one of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who had
haunted London since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times
office, to tell them all they did not know about Henry Adams,
rushed to the Legation to tell Adams all he did not want to know
about the Times. For a moment Adams thought his "usefulness" at
an end in other respects than in the press, but a day or two more
taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had
not even a club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the
Times article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and the
world had other persons -- such as President Lincoln, Secretary
Seward, and Commodore Wilkes -- for constant and favorite objects
of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful
again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education
at least had reached the point of seeing its own proportions.
"Surtout point de zele!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession for
a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among
Trent Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters and
meddled with no more newspapers, but he was still young, and felt
unkindly towards the editor of the London Times.
Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the
Trent Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to
its surprise, still in place. Although the private secretary saw
in this delay -- which he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense
-- no reason for changing his opinion about the views of the
British Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his
table, and go on copying papers, filing letters, and reading
newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the
brutality of Mr. Seward -- or vice versa. The heavy months
dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without improving
his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to
the end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for
it. During this tedious winter and for many months afterwards,
the only gleams of sunshine were on the days he passed at
Walton-on-Thames as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at
Mount Felix.
His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers,
although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were
strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be
kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper
Grosvenor Street were certainly the best in London; but none
offered a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first
time, the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis
was one of the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself
as closely as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy,
and he had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to
understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most
required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis,
a dozen years older than himself, could have good-naturedly
trained a school of such, without an effort, and with infinite
advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was
in this social polar winter, the single source of warmth and
light.
Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such
pressure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates
made common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was
merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the
younger members of the household, it was not quite so with the
Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they
gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with American
sources, British society had begun with violent social prejudice
against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except
Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three
generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind,
and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, the
fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself that this
new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary
suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to
do with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally
the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had
Lincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average
Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly
quiet manner and the unassailable social position of Minister
Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore him, since
they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the example.
Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politically he
was negligible; he was there to be put aside. London and Paris
imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln and his
hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams
would vanish with the rest.
This situation made Minister Adams an exception among
diplomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated
as members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility
of total extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe,
for a year at least, regarded the Washington Government as dead,
and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better
received than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by
little, in private, society took the habit of accepting him, not
so much as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition, or
an eminent counsel retained for a foreign Government. He was to
be received and considered; to be cordially treated as, by birth
and manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of
getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible
advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language,
birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in
order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr.
Adams apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society
few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double
personality and corresponding double weight.
The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of
the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes
and William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes
and Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be
supported. They saw what the private secretary in May had
overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the American
Minister made a mistake, and, since his strength was theirs, they
lost no time in expressing to all the world their estimate of the
Minister's character. Between them the Minister was almost safe.
One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences
of different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London,
possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for
in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a
large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes.
Every bore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the
"cool of the evening"; and of course he himself affected social
eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one
who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of
men -- of a great many men. A word from him went far. An
invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost
Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad,
and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he
had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which
were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made
speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too
high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men
who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and
had the ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social
position of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house
in Upper Brook Street to which most clever people were
exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no
one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous
to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader,
a strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a
collector of books, but above all he was a man of the world by
profession, and loved the contacts -- perhaps the collisions --
of society. Not even Henry Brougham dared do the things he did,
yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes was the good-nature of London;
the Gargantuan type of its refinement and coarseness; the most
universal figure of May Fair.
Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or
Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E.
Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever
to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite
the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or
political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or
variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the
singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and
Lancashiremen seem to hold dear -- the exterior roughness assumed
to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature.
Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker
ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and
emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a
daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace
of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union
cause and made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was
sure to do, partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery
convictions, and partly because it gave him a practical opening
in the House. As a new member, he needed a field.
Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership,
and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for
work. With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England
began to take heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his
true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action, and even the
private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam of
encouragement as he saw the ring begin to clear for these burly
Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely to be as brutal
as ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not exactly
light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters in
England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle
even Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed
as enemies of order, -- anarchists, -- and anarchists they were
if hatred of the so-called established orders made them so. About
them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly the
side of the Union against Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers
to London society, they were at home in the American Legation,
delightful dinner-company, talking always with reckless freedom.
Cobden was the milder and more persuasive; Bright was the more
dangerous to approach; but the private secretary delighted in
both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them talk the same
language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the House.
With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a
little ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it
might, and disposed to wait before moving again. Little by
little, friends gathered about the Legation who were no
fair-weather companions. The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall,
Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an annoying and troublesome
enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the most valuable
friends the Minister found, both politically and socially, and
the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private secretary
shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and never
forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's
claret which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he
insisted that it was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on
by assenting to his point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent
pleasure in dispute, and in that respect the Duke would perhaps
have done better; but the secretary had to admit that though at
other periods of life he was sufficiently and even amply snubbed
by Englishmen, he could never recall a single occasion during
this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.
Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either
men or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for
Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made
Devonshire House almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent
Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of
Alderley whose house was one of the most frequented in London.
Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was always a friend. Yet the
regular course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir
Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which young
Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped
them. Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came
into close alliance. By the time society began to reopen its
doors after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private
secretary occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no
more effort of any kind, but silently waited the end. Whatever
might be the advantages of social relations to his father and
mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and society was
futile. He meant to go home.
CHAPTER IX
FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
OF the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a
shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in
his short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he
could plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had
found his chief amusement in bloodshed; but the ferocious joy of
destruction at its best requires that one should kill what one
hates, and young Adams neither hated nor wanted to kill his
friends the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as to wipe
England off the earth. Never could any good come from that
besotted race! He was feebly trying to save his own life. Every
day the British Government deliberately crowded him one step
further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knew it; no
one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent
Affair showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of
the rebel cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes,
the sign of hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to
intervene. Lord Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were
discourteous in their indifference, and, to an irritable young
private secretary of twenty-four, were insolent in their
disregard of truth. Whatever forms of phrase were usual in public
to modify the harshness of invective, in private no political
opponent in England, and few political friends, hesitated to say
brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This was no great
reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the
intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief
that Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an
instant did the Legation draw a free breath. The suspense was
hideous and unendurable.
The Minister, no doubt, endured it, but he had support and
consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his
friends who were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps about
Richmond, or his enemies who were exulting in Pall Mall. He bore
it as well as he could till midsummer, but, when the story of the
second Bull Run appeared, he could bear it no longer, and after a
sleepless night, walking up and down his room without reflecting
that his father was beneath him, he announced at breakfast his
intention to go home into the army. His mother seemed to be less
impressed by the announcement than by the walking over her head,
which was so unlike her as to surprise her son. His father, too,
received the announcement quietly. No doubt they expected it, and
had taken their measures in advance. In those days, parents got
used to all sorts of announcements from their children. Mr. Adams
took his son's defection as quietly as he took Bull Run; but his
son never got the chance to go. He found obstacles constantly
rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brother Charles, who
was himself in the Army of the Potomac, and whose opinion had
always the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with
delaying action; but he felt, of his own accord, that if he
deserted his post in London, and found the Capuan comforts he
expected in Virginia where he would have only bullets to wound
him, he would never forgive himself for leaving his father and
mother alone to be devoured by the wild beasts of the British
amphitheatre. This reflection might not have stopped him, but his
father's suggestion was decisive. The Minister pointed out that
it was too late for him to take part in the actual campaign, and
that long before next spring they would all go home together.
The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel
cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again
to copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a
continuous supply. Properly, the affidavits were no business of
the private secretary, but practically the private secretary did
a second secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would
save Mr. Seward the trouble of sending more secretaries of his
own selection to help the Minister. The work was nothing, and no
one ever complained of it; not even Moran, the Secretary of
Legation after the departure of Charley Wilson, though he might
sit up all night to copy. Not the work, but the play exhausted.
The effort of facing a hostile society was bad enough, but that
of facing friends was worse. After terrific disasters like the
seven days before Richmond and the second Bull Run, friends
needed support; a tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the
average mind sees quickest through a bluff; nothing answers but
candor; yet private secretaries never feel candid, however much
they feel the reverse, and therefore they must affect candor; not
always a simple act when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and
choking with tears over the blunders and incapacity of one's
Government. If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
Least of all, must one throw extra strain on the Minister, who
had all he could carry without being fretted in his family. One
must read one's Times every morning over one's muffin without
reading aloud -- "Another disastrous Federal Defeat"; and one
might not even indulge in harmless profanity. Self-restraint
among friends required much more effort than keeping a quiet face
before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day the
private secretary smiled, when standing with the crowd in the
throne-room while the endless procession made bows to the royal
family, at hearing, behind his shoulder, one Cabinet Minister
remark gaily to another: "So the Federals have got another
licking!" The point of the remark was its truth. Even a private
secretary had learned to control his tones and guard his features
and betray no joy over the "lickings" of an enemy -- in the
enemy's presence.
London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial;
it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of
Abraham Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible
more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two
men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless;
explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust
itself. One's best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for
the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality and Seward's ferocity
became a dogma of popular faith. The last time Henry Adams saw
Thackeray, before his sudden death at Christmas in 1863, was in
entering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening reception.
Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing because,
in his usual blind way, he had stumbled into the wrong house and
not found it out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he
knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his
tone changed as he spoke of his -- and Adams's -- friend, Mrs.
Frank Hampton, of South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally
Baxter and painted as Ethel Newcome. Though he had never quite
forgiven her marriage, his warmth of feeling revived when he
heard that she had died of consumption at Columbia while her
parents and sister were refused permission to pass through the
lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice trembled
and his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln and
his hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals
made a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of women --
particularly of women -- in order to punish their opponents. On
quite insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had
Adams carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was
unjust, he would have gained nothing by showing them. At that
moment Thackeray, and all London society with him, needed the
nervous relief of expressing emotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not
what they said he -- was what were they?
For like reason, the members of the Legation kept silence, even
in private, under the boorish Scotch jibes of Carlyle. If Carlyle
was wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this
measure would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more
sincere or more sound in one thought than in another. The proof
that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt
to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself. Demolition
of one's idols is painful, and Carlyle had been an idol. Doubts
cast on his stature spread far into general darkness like shadows
of a setting sun. Not merely the idols fell, but also the habit
of faith. If Carlyle, too, was a fraud, what were his scholars
and school?
Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to
complain than every other diplomatist has had, in like
conditions, but one's few friends in society were mere ornament.
The Legation could not dream of contesting social control. The
best they could do was to escape mortification, and by this time
their relations were good enough to save the Minister's family
from that annoyance. Now and then, the fact could not be wholly
disguised that some one had refused to meet -- or to receive --
the Minister; but never an open insult, or any expression of
which the Minister had to take notice. Diplomacy served as a
buffer in times of irritation, and no diplomat who knew his
business fretted at what every diplomat -- and none more commonly
than the English -- had to expect; therefore Henry Adams, though
not a diplomat and wholly unprotected, went his way peacefully
enough, seeing clearly that society cared little to make his
acquaintance, but seeing also no reason why society should
discover charms in him of which he was himself unconscious. He
went where he was asked; he was always courteously received; he
was, on the whole, better treated than at Washington; and he held
his tongue.
For a thousand reasons, the best diplomatic house in London was
Lord Palmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the
worst. Of neither host could a private secretary expect to know
anything. He might as well have expected to know the Grand Lama.
Personally Lord Palmerston was the last man in London that a
cautious private secretary wanted to know. Other Prime Ministers
may perhaps have lived who inspired among diplomatists as much
distrust as Palmerston, and yet between Palmerston's word and
Russell's word, one hesitated to decide, and gave years of
education to deciding, whether either could be trusted, or how
far. The Queen herself in her famous memorandum of August 12,
1850, gave her opinion of Palmerston in words that differed
little from words used by Lord John Russell, and both the Queen
and Russell said in substance only what Cobden and Bright said in
private. Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the diplomatic
standard of trust seemed to be other than the parliamentarian No
professional diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Words were
with them forms of expression which varied with individuals, but
falsehood was more or less necessary to all. The worst liars were
the candid. What diplomatists wanted to know was the motive that
lay beyond the expression. In the case of Palmerston they were
unanimous in warning new colleagues that they might expect to be
sacrificed by him to any momentary personal object. Every new
Minister or Ambassador at the Court of St. James received this
preliminary lesson that he must, if possible, keep out of
Palmerston's reach. The rule was not secret or merely diplomatic.
The Queen herself had emphatically expressed the same opinion
officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain, he would go down
to the House of Commons and betray or misrepresent a foreign
Minister, without concern for his victim. No one got back on him
with a blow equally mischievous -- not even the Queen -- for, as
old Baron Brunnow described him: "C'est une peau de rhinocere!"
Having gained his point, he laughed, and his public laughed with
him, for the usual British -- or American -- public likes to be
amused, and thought it very amusing to see these beribboned and
bestarred foreigners caught and tossed and gored on the horns of
this jovial, slashing, devil-may-care British bull.
Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is
their own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them;
but they complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to
lay traps. He was the enfant terrible of the British Government.
On the other hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and
loyal. All the diplomats and their wives seemed to think so, and
took their troubles to her, believing that she would try to help
them. For this reason among others, her evenings at home --
Saturday Reviews, they were called -- had great vogue. An
ignorant young American could not be expected to explain it.
Cambridge House was no better for entertaining than a score of
others. Lady Palmerston was no longer young or handsome, and
could hardly at any age have been vivacious. The people one met
there were never smart and seldom young; they were largely
diplomatic, and diplomats are commonly dull; they were largely
political, and politicians rarely decorate or beautify an evening
party; they were sprinkled with literary people, who are
notoriously unfashionable; the women were of course ill-dressed
and middle-aged; the men looked mostly bored or out of place;
yet, beyond a doubt, Cambridge House was the best, and perhaps
the only political house in London, and its success was due to
Lady Palmerston, who never seemed to make an effort beyond a
friendly recognition. As a lesson in social education, Cambridge
House gave much subject for thought. First or last, one was to
know dozens of statesmen more powerful and more agreeable than
Lord Palmerston; dozens of ladies more beautiful and more
painstaking than Lady Palmerston; but no political house so
successful as Cambridge House. The world never explains such
riddles. The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was "
sympathique."
The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or
tolerated, without a further effort to recognize their existence,
but they were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and
there they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop
or even a duke. This was the social diversion of young Adams. No
one knew him -- not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening
he ever attended, he gave his name as usual at the foot of the
staircase, and was rather disturbed to hear it shouted up as "Mr.
Handrew Hadams!" He tried to correct it, and the footman shouted
more loudly: "Mr. Hanthony Hadams!" With some temper he repeated
the correction, and was finally announced as "Mr. Halexander
Hadams," and under this name made his bow for the last time to
Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.
Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as he
stood at the door receiving his guests, talking probably to one
of his henchmen, Delane, Borthwick, or Hayward, who were sure to
be near. The laugh was singular, mechanical, wooden, and did not
seem to disturb his features. "Ha! . . . Ha! . . . Ha!" Each was
a slow, deliberate ejaculation, and all were in the same tone, as
though he meant to say: "Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes!" by way of
assurance. It was a laugh of 1810 and the Congress of Vienna.
Adams would have much liked to stop a moment and ask whether
William Pitt and the Duke of Wellington had laughed so; but young
men attached to foreign Ministers asked no questions at all of
Palmerston and their chiefs asked as few as possible. One made
the usual bow and received the usual glance of civility; then
passed on to Lady Palmerston, who was always kind in manner, but
who wasted no remarks; and so to Lady Jocelyn with her daughter,
who commonly had something friendly to say; then went through the
diplomatic corps, Brunnow, Musurus, Azeglio, Apponyi, Van de
Weyer, Bille, Tricoupi, and the rest, finally dropping into the
hands of some literary accident as strange there as one's self.
The routine varied little. There was no attempt at entertainment.
Except for the desperate isolation of these two first seasons,
even secretaries would have found the effort almost as mechanical
as a levee at St. James's Palace.
Lord Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary; he was Prime
Minister, but he loved foreign affairs and could no more resist
scoring a point in diplomacy than in whist. Ministers of foreign
powers, knowing his habits, tried to hold him at arms'-length,
and, to do this, were obliged to court the actual Foreign
Secretary, Lord John Russell, who, on July 30, 1861, was called
up to the House of Lords as an earl. By some process of personal
affiliation, Minister Adams succeeded in persuading himself that
he could trust Lord Russell more safely than Lord Palmerston. His
son, being young and ill-balanced in temper, thought there was
nothing to choose. Englishmen saw little difference between them,
and Americans were bound to follow English experience in English
character. Minister Adams had much to learn, although with him as
well as with his son, the months of education began to count as
aeons.
Just as Brunnow predicted, Lord Palmerston made his rush at
last, as unexpected as always, and more furiously than though
still a private secretary of twenty-four. Only a man who had been
young with the battle of Trafalgar could be fresh and jaunty to
that point, but Minister Adams was not in a position to
sympathize with octogenarian youth and found himself in a danger
as critical as that of his numerous predecessors. It was late one
after noon in June, 1862, as the private secretary returned, with
the Minister, from some social function, that he saw his father
pick up a note from his desk and read it in silence. Then he said
curtly: "Palmerston wants a quarrel!" This was the point of the
incident as he felt it. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; he must not
be gratified; he must be stopped. The matter of quarrel was
General Butler's famous woman-order at New Orleans, but the
motive was the belief in President Lincoln's brutality that had
taken such deep root in the British mind. Knowing Palmerston's
habits, the Minister took for granted that he meant to score a
diplomatic point by producing this note in the House of Commons.
If he did this at once, the Minister was lost; the quarrel was
made; and one new victim to Palmerston's passion for popularity
was sacrificed.
The moment was nervous -- as far as the private secretary knew,
quite the most critical moment in the records of American
diplomacy -- but the story belongs to history, not to education,
and can be read there by any one who cares to read it. As a part
of Henry Adams's education it had a value distinct from history.
That his father succeeded in muzzling Palmerston without a public
scandal, was well enough for the Minister, but was not enough for
a private secretary who liked going to Cambridge House, and was
puzzled to reconcile contradictions. That Palmerston had wanted a
quarrel was obvious; why, then, did he submit so tamely to being
made the victim of the quarrel? The correspondence that followed
his note was conducted feebly on his side, and he allowed the
United States Minister to close it by a refusal to receive
further communications from him except through Lord Russell. The
step was excessively strong, for it broke off private relations
as well as public, and cost even the private secretary his
invitations to Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried her best,
but the two ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do
with American Minister perplexed in the extreme. Not that Mr.
Adams lost his temper, for he never felt such a weight of
responsibility, and was never more cool; but he could conceive no
other way of protecting his Government, not to speak of himself,
than to force Lord Russell to interpose. He believed that
Palmerston's submission and silence were due to Russell. Perhaps
he was right; at the time, his son had no doubt of it, though
afterwards he felt less sure. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; the
motive seemed evident; yet when the quarrel was made, he backed
out of it; for some reason it seemed that he did not want it --
at least, not then. He never showed resentment against Mr. Adams
at the time or afterwards. He never began another quarrel.
Incredible as it seemed, he behaved like a well-bred gentleman
who felt himself in the wrong. Possibly this change may have been
due to Lord Russell's remonstrances, but the private secretary
would have felt his education in politics more complete had he
ever finally made up his mind whether Palmerston was more angry
with General Butler, or more annoyed at himself, for committing
what was in both cases an unpardonable betise.
At the time, the question was hardly raised, for no one doubted
Palmerston's attitude or his plans. The season was near its end,
and Cambridge House was soon closed. The Legation had troubles
enough without caring to publish more. The tide of English
feeling ran so violently against it that one could only wait to
see whether General McClellan would bring it relief. The year
1862 was a dark spot in Henry Adams's life, and the education it
gave was mostly one that he gladly forgot. As far as he was
aware, he made no friends; he could hardly make enemies; yet
towards the close of the year he was flattered by an invitation
from Monckton Milnes to Fryston, and it was one of many acts of
charity towards the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes
made it his business to be kind. Other people criticised him for
his manner of doing it, but never imitated him. Naturally, a
dispirited, disheartened private secretary was exceedingly
grateful, and never forgot the kindness, but it was chiefly as
education that this first country visit had value. Commonly,
country visits are much alike, but Monckton Milnes was never like
anybody, and his country parties served his purpose of mixing
strange elements. Fryston was one of a class of houses that no
one sought for its natural beauties, and the winter mists of
Yorkshire were rather more evident for the absence of the hostess
on account of them, so that the singular guests whom Milnes
collected to enliven his December had nothing to do but astonish
each other, if anything could astonish such men. Of the five,
Adams alone was tame; he alone added nothing to the wit or humor,
except as a listener; but they needed a listener and he was
useful. Of the remaining four, Milnes was the oldest, and perhaps
the sanest in spite of his superficial eccentricities, for
Yorkshire sanity was true to a standard of its own, if not to
other conventions; yet even Milnes startled a young American
whose Boston and Washington mind was still fresh. He would not
have been startled by the hard-drinking, horse-racing
Yorkshireman of whom he had read in books; but Milnes required a
knowledge of society and literature that only himself possessed,
if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had sought contact
with everybody and everything that Europe could offer. He knew it
all from several points of view, and chiefly as humorous.
The second of the party was also of a certain age; a quiet,
well-mannered, singularly agreeable gentleman of the literary
class. When Milnes showed Adams to his room to dress for dinner,
he stayed a moment to say a word about this guest, whom he called
Stirling of Keir. His sketch closed with the hint that Stirling
was violent only on one point -- hatred of Napoleon III. On that
point, Adams was himself sensitive, which led him to wonder how
bad the Scotch gentleman might be. The third was a man of thirty
or thereabouts, whom Adams had already met at Lady Palmerston's
carrying his arm in a sling. His figure and bearing were
sympathetic -- almost pathetic -- with a certain grave and gentle
charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He was
Lawrence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in
the fanatics' attack on the British Legation. He seemed
exceptionally sane and peculiarly suited for country houses,
where every man would enjoy his company, and every woman would
adore him. He had not then published "Piccadilly"; perhaps he was
writing it; while, like all the young men about the Foreign
Office, he contributed to The Owl.
The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a
year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action -- and in
this trait, was remotely followed, a generation later, by another
famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson -- a tropical bird,
high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and
screams of humor, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale.
One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no
ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon
Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always
unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency. He had
unearthed Henry Adams who knew himself to be worthless and not
current. When Milnes lingered a moment in Adams's room to add
that Swinburne had written some poetry, not yet published, of
really extraordinary merit, Adams only wondered what more Milnes
would discover, and whether by chance he could discover merit in
a private secretary. He was capable of it.
In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with
the usual club manners of ladyless dinner-tables, easy and formal
at the same time. Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his
dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into
other channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne
out. Then, at last, if never before, Adams acquired education.
What he had sought so long, he found; but he was none the wiser;
only the more astonished. For once, too, he felt at ease, for the
others were no less astonished than himself, and their
astonishment grew apace. For the rest of the evening Swinburne
figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only freer,
for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was
forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the
kitchen; but Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his
guests smoke in Adams's bedroom, since Adams was an
American-German barbarian ignorant of manners; and there after
dinner all sat -- or lay -- till far into the night, listening to
the rush of Swinburne's talk. In a long experience, before or
after, no one ever approached it; yet one had heard accounts of
the best talking of the time, and read accounts of talkers in all
time, among the rest, of Voltaire, who seemed to approach nearest
the pattern.
That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of
men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite
original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and
convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even
Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible
memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and
modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of
Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or
Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of
his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads --
"Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of
Burdens" -- which he declaimed as though they were books of the
Iliad. It was singular that his most appreciative listener should
have been the author only of pretty verses like "We wandered by
the brook-side," and "She seemed to those that saw them meet";
and who never cared to write in any other tone; but Milnes took
everything into his sympathies, including Americans like young
Adams whose standards were stiffest of all, while Swinburne,
though millions of ages far from them, united them by his humor
even more than by his poetry. The story of his first day as a
member of Professor Stubbs's household was professionally clever
farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who could write a Greek
ode or a Proven‡al chanson as easily as an English quatrain.
Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir
wanted to take with him to his chamber a copy of "Queen
Rosamund," the only volume Swinburne had then published, which
was on the library table, and Adams offered to light him down
with his solitary bedroom candle. All the way, Stirling was
ejaculating explosions of wonder, until at length, at the foot of
the stairs and at the climax of his imagination, he paused, and
burst out: "He's a cross between the devil and the Duke of
Argyll!"
To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious
critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one --
at least in person -- but he understood that to a Scotchman the
likeness meant something quite portentous, beyond English
experience, supernatural, and what the French call moyenageux, or
mediaeval with a grotesque turn. That Stirling as well as Milnes
should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who
lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that
Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and
pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia.
The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on
a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.
Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius
never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its
uttermost flights, was never moyenageux. One felt the horror of
Longfellow and Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of
Holmes, at the wild Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What
could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his
good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend in
Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry
Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams could no more
interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet.
To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of
genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there
the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only
receive; one had nothing to give -- nothing even to offer.
Swinburne tested him then and there by one of his favorite
tests -- Victor Hugo for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the
surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a
severe exercise for foreigners; it requires extraordinary
knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear to
appreciate even the recitation of French verse; but unless a poet
has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the
end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with
pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did
not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade
Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for
Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was
unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing.
Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to
sustain himself on the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo;
but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he
succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In
truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's
English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's
failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to
admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was
needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost.
The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew
his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly
mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he
was no companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an
annoyance; no number of centuries could ever educate him to
Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often
wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth
the poet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the American
insect would have been only too happy to bring, had he known how,
was hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France is the
attitude of prayer possible; in England it became absurd. Even
Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendors of Hugo and Landor, was
almost as helpless as an American private secretary in personal
contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the
Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a
call he had made on Hugo: "I was shown into a large room," he
said, "with women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and
Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his
voice solemnly, and uttered the words: 'Quant a moi, je crois en
Dieu!' Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if in deep
meditation: 'Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croft en Dieu!"'
With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the
actors had not the instinct of the drama; and yet even a private
secretary was not wholly wanting in instinct. As soon as he
reached town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of "Queen
Rosamund," and at that time, if Swinburne was not joking,
Pickering had sold seven copies. When the "Poems and Ballads"
came out, and met their great success and scandal, he sought one
of the first copies from Moxon. If he had sinned and doubted at
all, he wholly repented and did penance before "Atalanta in
Calydon," and would have offered Swinburne a solemn worship as
Milnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the poet.
Unfortunately it was worthless.
The three young men returned to London, and each went his own
way. Adams's interest in making friends was something desperate,
but "the London season," Milnes used to say, "is a season for
making acquaintances and losing friends"; there was no intimate
life. Of Swinburne he saw no more till Monckton Milnes summoned
his whole array of Frystonians to support him in presiding at the
dinner of the Authors' Fund, when Adams found himself seated next
to Swinburne, famous then, but no nearer. They never met again.
Oliphant he met oftener; all the world knew and loved him; but he
too disappeared in the way that all the world knows. Stirling of
Keir, after one or two efforts, passed also from Adams's vision
into Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. The only record of his
wonderful visit to Fryston may perhaps exist still in the
registers of the St. James's Club, for immediately afterwards
Milnes proposed Henry Adams for membership, and unless his memory
erred, the nomination was seconded by Tricoupi and endorsed by
Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was a little
singular for variety, but on the whole it suggested that the
private secretary was getting on.
CHAPTER X
POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquired
whether Minister Adams would like the place of Assistant
Secretary for his son. It was the first -- and last -- office
ever offered him, if indeed he could claim what was offered in
fact to his father. To them both, the change seemed useless. Any
young man could make some sort of Assistant Secretary; only one,
just at that moment, could make an Assistant Son. More than half
his duties were domestic; they sometimes required long absences;
they always required independence of the Government service. His
position was abnormal. The British Government by courtesy allowed
the son to go to Court as Attache, though he was never attached,
and after five or six years' toleration, the decision was
declared irregular. In the Legation, as private secretary, he was
liable to do Secretary's work. In society, when official, he was
attached to the Minister; when unofficial, he was a young man
without any position at all. As the years went on, he began to
find advantages in having no position at all except that of young
man. Gradually he aspired to become a gentleman; just a member of
society like the rest. The position was irregular; at that time
many positions were irregular; yet it lent itself to a sort of
irregular education that seemed to be the only sort of education
the young man was ever to get.
Such as it was, few young men had more. The spring and summer
of 1863 saw a great change in Secretary Seward's management of
foreign affairs. Under the stimulus of danger, he too got
education. He felt, at last, that his official representatives
abroad needed support. Officially he could give them nothing but
despatches, which were of no great value to any one; and at best
the mere weight of an office had little to do with the public.
Governments were made to deal with Governments, not with private
individuals or with the opinions of foreign society. In order to
affect European opinion, the weight of American opinion had to be
brought to bear personally, and had to be backed by the weight of
American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously to work and sent
over every important American on whom he could lay his hands. All
came to the Legation more or less intimately, and Henry Adams had
a chance to see them all, bankers or bishops, who did their work
quietly and well, though, to the outsider, the work seemed wasted
and the "influential classes" more indurated with prejudice than
ever. The waste was only apparent; the work all told in the end,
and meanwhile it helped education.
Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the
Minister and to cooperate with him. The most interesting of these
was Thurlow Weed, who came to do what the private secretary
himself had attempted two years before, with boyish ignorance of
his own powers. Mr. Weed took charge of the press, and began, to
the amused astonishment of the secretaries, by making what the
Legation had learned to accept as the invariable mistake of every
amateur diplomat; he wrote letters to the London Times. Mistake
or not, Mr. Weed soon got into his hands the threads of
management, and did quietly and smoothly all that was to be done.
With his work the private secretary had no connection; it was he
that interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete American education
in himself. His mind was naturally strong and beautifully
balanced; his temper never seemed ruffled; his manners were
carefully perfect in the style of benevolent simplicity, the
tradition of Benjamin Franklin. He was the model of political
management and patient address; but the trait that excited
enthusiasm in a private secretary was his faculty of irresistibly
conquering confidence. Of all flowers in the garden of education,
confidence was becoming the rarest; but before Mr. Weed went
away, young Adams followed him about not only obediently -- for
obedience had long since become a blind instinct -- but rather
with sympathy and affection, much like a little dog.
The sympathy was not due only to Mr. Weed's skill of
management, although Adams never met another such master, or any
one who approached him; nor was the confidence due to any display
of professions, either moral or social, by Mr. Weed. The trait
that astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparent
unselfishness. Never, in any man who wielded such power, did
Adams meet anything like it. The effect of power and publicity on
all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by
killing the victim's sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a
passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use
expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it
stimulates; and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a rare
immune. He thought apparently not of himself, but of the person
he was talking with. He held himself naturally in the background.
He was not jealous. He grasped power, but not office. He
distributed offices by handfuls without caring to take them. He
had the instinct of empire: he gave, but he did not receive. This
rare superiority to the politicians he controlled, a trait that
private secretaries never met in the politicians themselves,
excited Adams's wonder and curiosity, but when he tried to get
behind it, and to educate himself from the stores of Mr. Weed's
experience, he found the study still more fascinating. Management
was an instinct with Mr. Weed; an object to be pursued for its
own sake, as one plays cards; but he appeared to play with men as
though they were only cards; he seemed incapable of feeling
himself one of them. He took them and played them for their
face-value; but once, when he had told, with his usual humor,
some stories of his political experience which were strong even
for the Albany lobby, the private secretary made bold to ask him
outright: "Then, Mr. Weed, do you think that no politician can be
trusted? " Mr. Weed hesitated for a moment; then said in his mild
manner: "I never advise a young man to begin by thinking so."
This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral
sense, as though Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions !" As
he grew older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it as a
question of how the game should be played. Young men most needed
experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a general
rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles had better be
left aside; values were enough. Adams knew that he could never
learn to play politics in so masterly a fashion as this: his
education and his nervous system equally forbade it, although he
admired all the more the impersonal faculty of the political
master who could thus efface himself and his temper in the game.
He noticed that most of the greatest politicians in history had
seemed to regard men as counters. The lesson was the more
interesting because another famous New Yorker came over at the
same time who liked to discuss the same problem. Secretary Seward
sent William M. Evarts to London as law counsel, and Henry began
an acquaintance with Mr. Evarts that soon became intimate. Evarts
was as individual as Weed was impersonal; like most men, he cared
little for the game, or how it was played, and much for the
stakes, but he played it in a large and liberal way, like Daniel
Webster, "a great advocate employed in politics." Evarts was also
an economist of morals, but with him the question was rather how
much morality one could afford. "The world can absorb only doses
of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One sought
education in order to adjust the dose.
The teachings of Weed and Evarts were practical, and the
private secretary's life turned on their value. England's power
of absorbing truth was small. Englishmen, such as Palmerston,
Russell, Bethell, and the society represented by the Times and
Morning Post, as well as the Tories represented by Disraeli, Lord
Robert Cecil, and the Standard, offered a study in education that
sickened a young student with anxiety. He had begun -- contrary
to Mr. Weed's advice -- by taking their bad faith for granted.
Was he wrong? To settle this point became the main object of the
diplomatic education so laboriously pursued, at a cost already
stupendous, and promising to become ruinous. Life changed front,
according as one thought one's self dealing with honest men or
with rogues.
Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of
dishonesty. The reasons that satisfied him had not altogether
satisfied his father, and of course his father's doubts gravely
shook his own convictions, but, in practice, if only for safety,
the Legation put little or no confidence in Ministers, and there
the private secretary's diplomatic education began. The
recognition of belligerency, the management of the Declaration of
Paris, the Trent Affair, all strengthened the belief that Lord
Russell had started in May, 1861, with the assumption that the
Confederacy was established; every step he had taken proved his
persistence in the same idea; he never would consent to put
obstacles in the way of recognition; and he was waiting only for
the proper moment to interpose. All these points seemed so fixed
-- so self-evident -- that no one in the Legation would have
doubted or even discussed them except that Lord Russell
obstinately denied the whole charge, and persisted in assuring
Minister Adams of his honest and impartial neutrality.
With the insolence of youth and zeal, Henry Adams jumped at once
to the conclusion that Earl Russell -- like other statesmen --
lied; and, although the Minister thought differently, he had to
act as though Russell were false. Month by month the
demonstration followed its mathematical stages; one of the most
perfect educational courses in politics and diplomacy that a
young man ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly tutors in
the world were provided for him at public expense -- Lord
Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr.
Gladstone, Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by the
British Government; William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams,
William Maxwell Evarts, Thurlow Weed, and other considerable
professors employed by the American Government; but there was
only one student to profit by this immense staff of teachers. The
private secretary alone sought education.
To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught.
Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel's metaphysical
doctrine of the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to
understand. Yet the stages of demonstration were clear. They
began in June, 1862, after the escape of one rebel cruiser, by
the remonstrances of the Minister against the escape of "No.
290," which was imminent. Lord Russell declined to act on the
evidence. New evidence was sent in every few days, and with it,
on July 24, was included Collier's legal opinion: "It appears
difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement of the
Foreign Enlistment Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion,
is little better than a dead letter." Such language implied
almost a charge of collusion with the rebel agents -- an intent
to aid the Confederacy. In spite of the warning, Earl Russell let
the ship, four days afterwards, escape.
Young Adams had nothing to do with law; that was business of
his betters. His opinion of law hung on his opinion of lawyers.
In spite of Thurlow Weed's advice, could one afford to trust
human nature in politics ? History said not. Sir Robert Collier
seemed to hold that Law agreed with History. For education the
point was vital. If one could not trust a dozen of the most
respected private characters in the world, composing the Queen's
Ministry, one could trust no mortal man.
Lord Russell felt the force of this inference, and undertook to
disprove it. His effort lasted till his death. At first he
excused himself by throwing the blame on the law officers. This
was a politician's practice, and the lawyers overruled it. Then
he pleaded guilty to criminal negligence, and said in his
"Recollections":-- "I assent entirely to the opinion of the Lord
Chief Justice of England that the Alabama ought to have been
detained during the four days I was waiting for the opinion of
the law officers. But I think that the fault was not that of the
commissioners of customs, it was my fault as Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs." This concession brought all parties on
common ground. Of course it was his fault! The true issue lay not
in the question of his fault, but of his intent. To a young man,
getting an education in politics, there could be no sense in
history unless a constant course of faults implied a constant
motive.
For his father the question was not so abstruse; it was a
practical matter of business to be handled as Weed or Evarts
handled their bargains and jobs. Minister Adams held the
convenient belief that, in the main, Russell was true, and the
theory answered his purposes so well that he died still holding
it. His son was seeking education, and wanted to know whether he
could, in politics, risk trusting any one. Unfortunately no one
could then decide; no one knew the facts. Minister Adams died
without knowing them. Henry Adams was an older man than his
father in 1862, before he learned a part of them. The most
curious fact, even then, was that Russell believed in his own
good faith and that Argyll believed in it also.
Argyll betrayed a taste for throwing the blame on Bethell, Lord
Westbury, then Lord Chancellor, but this escape helped Adams not
at all. On the contrary, it complicated the case of Russell. In
England, one half of society enjoyed throwing stones at Lord
Palmerston, while the other half delighted in flinging mud at
Earl Russell, but every one of every party united in pelting
Westbury with every missile at hand. The private secretary had no
doubts about him, for he never professed to be moral. He was the
head and heart of the whole rebel contention, and his opinions on
neutrality were as clear as they were on morality. The private
secretary had nothing to do with him, and regretted it, for Lord
Westbury's wit and wisdom were great; but as far as his authority
went he affirmed the law that in politics no man should be
trusted.
Russell alone insisted on his honesty of intention and
persuaded both the Duke and the Minister to believe him. Every
one in the Legation accepted his assurances as the only
assertions they could venture to trust. They knew he expected the
rebels to win in the end, but they believed he would not actively
interpose to decide it. On that -- on nothing else -- they rested
their frail hopes of remaining a day longer in England. Minister
Adams remained six years longer in England; then returned to
America to lead a busy life till he died in 1886 still holding
the same faith in Earl Russell, who had died in 1878. In 1889,
Spencer Walpole published the official life of Earl Russell, and
told a part of the story which had never been known to the
Minister and which astounded his son, who burned with curiosity
to know what his father would have said of it.
The story was this: The Alabama escaped, by Russell's confessed
negligence, on July 28, 1862. In America the Union armies had
suffered great disasters before Richmond and at the second Bull
Run, August 29-30, followed by Lee's invasion of Maryland,
September 7, the news of which, arriving in England on September
14, roused the natural idea that the crisis was at hand. The next
news was expected by the Confederates to announce the fall of
Washington or Baltimore. Palmerston instantly, September 14,
wrote to Russell: "If this should happen, would it not be time
for us to consider whether in such a state of things England and
France might not address the contending parties and recommend an
arrangement on the basis of separation?"
This letter, quite in the line of Palmerston's supposed
opinions, would have surprised no one, if it had been
communicated to the Legation; and indeed, if Lee had captured
Washington, no one could have blamed Palmerston for offering
intervention. Not Palmerston's letter but Russell's reply,
merited the painful attention of a young man seeking a moral
standard for judging politicians: --
GOTHA, September, 17, 1862
MY DEAR PALMERSTON:--
Whether the Federal army is destroyed or not, it is clear
that it is driven back to Washington and has made no progress
in subduing the insurgent States. Such being the case, I agree
with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the
United States Government with a view to the recognition of the
independence of the Confederates. I agree further that in case
of failure, we ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States
as an independent State. For the purpose of taking so important
a step, I think we must have a meeting of the Cabinet. The 23d
or 30th would suit me for the meeting.
We ought then, if we agree on such a step, to propose it
first to France, and then on the part of England and France, to
Russia and other powers, as a measure decided upon by us.
We ought to make ourselves safe in Canada, not by sending
more troops there, but by concentrating those we have in a few
defensible posts before the winter sets in. . . .
Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical
difficulty in education which a mere student could never
overcome; a difficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want
of experience, but in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord
Russell's course had been consistent from the first, and had all
the look of rigid determination to recognize the Southern
Confederacy "with a view" to breaking up the Union. His letter of
September 17 hung directly on his encouragement of the Alabama
and his protection of the rebel navy; while the whole of his plan
had its root in the Proclamation of Belligerency, May 13, 1861.
The policy had every look of persistent forethought, but it took
for granted the deliberate dishonesty of three famous men:
Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. This dishonesty, as concerned
Russell, was denied by Russell himself, and disbelieved by
Argyll, Forster, and most of America's friends in England, as
well as by Minister Adams. What the Minister would have thought
had he seen this letter of September 17, his son would have
greatly liked to know, but he would have liked still more to know
what the Minister would have thought of Palmerston's answer,
dated September 23: --
. . . It is evident that a great conflict is taking place to
the northwest of Washington, and its issue must have a great
effect on the state of affairs. If the Federals sustain a great
defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation, and the iron
should be struck while it is hot. If, on the other hand, they
should have the best of it, we may wait a while and see what
may follow. . .
The roles were reversed. Russell wrote what was expected from
Palmerston, or even more violently; while Palmerston wrote what
was expected from Russell, or even more temperately. The private
secretary's view had been altogether wrong, which would not have
much surprised even him, but he would have been greatly
astonished to learn that the most confidential associates of
these men knew little more about their intentions than was known
in the Legation. The most trusted member of the Cabinet was Lord
Granville, and to him Russell next wrote. Granville replied at
once decidedly opposing recognition of the Confederacy, and
Russell sent the reply to Palmerston, who returned it October 2,
with the mere suggestion of waiting for further news from
America. At the same time Granville wrote to another member of
the Cabinet, Lord Stanley of Alderley, a letter published forty
years afterwards in Granville's "Life" (I, 442) to the private
secretary altogether the most curious and instructive relic of
the whole lesson in politics:
. . . I have written to Johnny my reasons for thinking it
decidedly premature. I, however, suspect you will settle to do
so. Pam., Johnny, and Gladstone would be in favor of it, and
probably Newcastle. I do not know about the others. It appears
to me a great mistake. . . .
Out of a Cabinet of a dozen members, Granville, the best
informed of them all, could pick only three who would favor
recognition. Even a private secretary thought he knew as much as
this, or more. Ignorance was not confined to the young and
insignificant, nor were they the only victims of blindness.
Granville's letter made only one point clear. He knew of no fixed
policy or conspiracy. If any existed, it was confined to
Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and perhaps Newcastle. In truth,
the Legation knew, then, all that was to be known, and the true
fault of education was to suspect too much.
By that time, October 3, news of Antietam and of Lee's retreat
into Virginia had reached London. The Emancipation Proclamation
arrived. Had the private secretary known all that Granville or
Palmerston knew, he would surely have thought the danger past, at
least for a time, and any man of common sense would have told him
to stop worrying over phantoms. This healthy lesson would have
been worth much for practical education, but it was quite upset
by the sudden rush of a new actor upon the stage with a rhapsody
that made Russell seem sane, and all education superfluous.
This new actor, as every one knows, was William Ewart
Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. If, in the domain of
the world's politics, one point was fixed, one value ascertained,
one element serious, it was the British Exchequer; and if one man
lived who could be certainly counted as sane by overwhelming
interest, it was the man who had in charge the finances of
England. If education had the smallest value, it should have
shown its force in Gladstone, who was educated beyond all record
of English training. From him, if from no one else, the poor
student could safely learn.
Here is what he learned! Palmerston notified Gladstone,
September 24, of the proposed intervention: "If I am not
mistaken, you would be inclined to approve such a course."
Gladstone replied the next day: "He was glad to learn what the
Prime Minister had told him; and for two reasons especially he
desired that the proceedings should be prompt: the first was the
rapid progress of the Southern arms and the extension of the area
of Southern feeling; the second was the risk of violent
impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire such as would
prejudice the dignity and disinterestedness of the proffered
mediation."
Had the puzzled student seen this letter, he must have
concluded from it that the best educated statesman England ever
produced did not know what he was talking about, an assumption
which all the world would think quite inadmissible from a private
secretary -- but this was a trifle. Gladstone having thus
arranged, with Palmerston and Russell, for intervention in the
American war, reflected on the subject for a fortnight from
September 25 to October 7, when he was to speak on the occasion
of a great dinner at Newcastle. He decided to announce the
Government's policy with all the force his personal and official
authority could give it. This decision was no sudden impulse; it
was the result of deep reflection pursued to the last moment. On
the morning of October 7, he entered in his diary: "Reflected
further on what I should say about Lancashire and America, for
both these subjects are critical." That evening at dinner, as the
mature fruit of his long study, he deliberately pronounced the
famous phrase:--
. . . We know quite well that the people of the Northern States
have not yet drunk of the cup -- they are still trying to hold
it far from their lips -- which all the rest of the world see
they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions
about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is
no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South
have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and
they have made, what is more than either, they have made a
nation. . . .
Looking back, forty years afterwards, on this episode, one
asked one's self painfully whet sort of a lesson a young man
should have drawn, for the purposes of his education, from this
world-famous teaching of a very great master. In the heat of
passion at the moment, one drew some harsh moral conclusions:
Were they incorrect? Posed bluntly as rules of conduct, they led
to the worst possible practices. As morals, one could detect no
shade of difference between Gladstone and Napoleon except to the
advantage of Napoleon. The private secretary saw none; he
accepted the teacher in that sense; he took his lesson of
political morality as learned, his notice to quit as duly served,
and supposed his education to be finished.
Every one thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil. Any
intelligent education ought to end when it is complete. One would
then feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world. The
old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the actual
drama is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue. When the
curtain fell on Gladstone's speech, any student had the right to
suppose the drama ended; none could have affirmed that it was
about to begin; that one's painful lesson was thrown away.
Even after forty years, most people would refuse to believe it;
they would still insist that Gladstone, Russell, and Palmerston
were true villains of melodrama. The evidence against Gladstone
in special seemed overwhelming. The word "must" can never be used
by a responsible Minister of one Government towards another, as
Gladstone used it. No one knew so well as he that he and his own
officials and friends at Liverpool were alone "making" a rebel
navy, and that Jefferson Davis had next to nothing to do with it.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer he was the Minister most
interested in knowing that Palmerston, Russell, and himself were
banded together by mutual pledge to make the Confederacy a nation
the next week, and that the Southern leaders had as yet no hope
of "making a nation" but in them. Such thoughts occurred to every
one at the moment and time only added to their force. Never in
the history of political turpitude had any brigand of modern
civilization offered a worse example. The proof of it was that it
outraged even Palmerston, who immediately put up Sir George
Cornewall Lewis to repudiate the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
against whom he turned his press at the same time. Palmerston had
no notion of letting his hand be forced by Gladstone.
Russell did nothing of the kind; if he agreed with Palmerston,
he followed Gladstone. Although he had just created a new evangel
of non-intervention for Italy, and preached it like an apostle,
he preached the gospel of intervention in America as though he
were a mouthpiece of the Congress of Vienna. On October 13, he
issued his call for the Cabinet to meet, on October 23, for
discussion of the "duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the
most friendly and conciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of
arms." Meanwhile Minister Adams, deeply perturbed and profoundly
anxious, would betray no sign of alarm, and purposely delayed to
ask explanation. The howl of anger against Gladstone became
louder every day, for every one knew that the Cabinet was called
for October 23, and then could not fail to decide its policy
about the United States. Lord Lyons put off his departure for
America till October 25 expressly to share in the conclusions to
be discussed on October 23. When Minister Adams at last requested
an interview, Russell named October 23 as the day. To the last
moment every act of Russell showed that, in his mind, the
intervention was still in doubt.
When Minister Adams, at the interview, suggested that an
explanation was due him, he watched Russell with natural
interest, and reported thus:
. . . His lordship took my allusion at once, though not
without a slight indication of embarrassment. He said that Mr.
Gladstone had been evidently much misunderstood. I must have
seen in the newspapers the letters which contained his later
explanations. That he had certain opinions in regard to the
nature of the struggle in America, as on all public questions,
just as other Englishmen had, was natural enough. And it was
the fashion here for public men to express such as they held in
their public addresses. Of course it was not for him to disavow
anything on the part of Mr. Gladstone; but he had no idea that
in saying what he had, there was a serious intention to justify
any of the inferences that had been drawn from it of a
disposition in the Government now to adopt a new policy. . . .
A student trying to learn the processes of politics in a free
government could not but ponder long on the moral to be drawn
from this "explanation" of Mr. Gladstone by Earl Russell. The
point set for study as the first condition of political life, was
whether any politician could be believed or trusted. The question
which a private secretary asked himself, in copying this despatch
of October 24, 1862, was whether his father believed, or should
believe, one word of Lord Russell's "embarrassment." The "truth"
was not known for thirty years, but when published, seemed to be
the reverse of Earl Russell's statement. Mr. Gladstone's speech
had been drawn out by Russell's own policy of intervention and
had no sense except to declare the "disposition in the Government
now to adopt" that new policy. Earl Russell never disavowed
Gladstone, although Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall
Lewis instantly did so. As far as the curious student could
penetrate the mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed Earl Russell's
intent.
As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would
decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively
honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might
be ignored as a delusion. Therefore the student felt compelled to
reach some sort of idea that should serve to bring the case
within a general law. Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He
bluntly told Russell that while he was "willing to acquit"
Gladstone of "any deliberate intention to bring on the worst
effects," he was bound to say that Gladstone was doing it quite
as certainly as if he had one; and to this charge, which struck
more sharply at Russell's secret policy than at Gladstone's
public defence of it, Russell replied as well as he could: --
. . . His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that Lord
Palmerston and other members of the Government regretted the
speech, and`Mr. Gladstone himself was not disinclined to
correct, as far as he could, the misinterpretation which had
been made of it. It was still their intention to adhere to the
rule of perfect neutrality in the struggle, and to let it come
to its natural end without the smallest interference, direct or
otherwise. But he could not say what circumstances might happen
from month to month in the future. I observed that the policy
he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and asked if I was to
understand him as saying that no change of it was now proposed.
To which he gave his assent. . . .
Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that
Russell could be trusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was
the diplomatic tradition, especially held by the Russian
diplomats. Possibly it was sound, but it helped in no way the
education of a private secretary. The cat's-paw theory offered no
safer clue, than the frank, old-fashioned, honest theory of
villainy. Neither the one nor the other was reasonable.
No one ever told the Minister that Earl Russell, only a few
hours before, had asked the Cabinet to intervene, and that the
Cabinet had refused. The Minister was led to believe that the
Cabinet meeting was not held, and that its decision was informal.
Russell's biographer said that, "with this memorandum [of
Russell's, dated October 13] the Cabinet assembled from all parts
of the country on October 23; but . . . members of the Cabinet
doubted the policy of moving, or moving at that time." The Duke
of Newcastle and Sir George Grey joined Granville in opposition.
As far as known, Russell and Gladstone stood alone.
"Considerations such as these prevented the matter being pursued
any further."
Still no one has distinctly said that this decision was formal;
perhaps the unanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet
unnecessary; but it is certain that, within an hour or two before
or after this decision, "his lordship said [to the United States
Minister] that the policy of the Government was to adhere to a
strict neutrality and to leave this struggle to settle itself."
When Mr. Adams, not satisfied even with this positive assurance,
pressed for a categorical answer: "I asked him if I was to
understand that policy as not now to be changed; he said: Yes!"
John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of
Gladstone," forty years afterwards, would have interested the
Minister, as well as his private secretary: "If this relation be
accurate," said Morley of a relation officially published at the
time, and never questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary did not
construe strict neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call
good offices." For a vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's
construction of neutrality mattered little to the student, who
asked only Russell's intent, and cared only to know whether his
construction had any other object than to deceive the Minister.
In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and
possibly Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his
personal friend Mr. Adams; but to one who is still in the world
even if not of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell
totally deceived the private secretary, whatever he may have done
to the Minister. The policy of abstention was not settled on
October 23. Only the next day, October 24, Gladstone circulated a
rejoinder to G. C. Lewis, insisting on the duty of England,
France, and Russia to intervene by representing, "with moral
authority and force, the opinion of the civilized world upon the
conditions of the case." Nothing had been decided. By some means,
scarcely accidental, the French Emperor was led to think that his
influence might turn the scale, and only ten days after Russell's
categorical "Yes!" Napoleon officially invited him to say "No!"
He was more than ready to do so. Another Cabinet meeting was
called for November 11, and this time Gladstone himself reports
the debate:
Nov. 11. We have had our Cabinet to-day and meet again
tomorrow. I am afraid we shall do little or nothing in the
business of America. But I will send you definite intelligence.
Both Lords Palmerston and Russell are right.
Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely
fighting out his battle. However, though we decline for the
moment, the answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave
the matter very open for the future.
Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about America
public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not
take it as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may
themselves act in the matter. It will be clear that we concur
with them, that the war should cease. Palmerston gave to
Russell's proposal a feeble and half-hearted support.
Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who
looked on at this scene, was dead, the private secretary of 1862
read these lines with stupor, and hurried to discuss them with
John Hay, who was more astounded than himself. All the world had
been at cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and the
situation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, had
known none of the facts. One would have done better to draw no
conclusions at all. One's diplomatic education was a long
mistake.
These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on
September 14, under the impression that the President was about
to be driven from Washington and the Army of the Potomac
dispersed, suggested to Russell that in such a case, intervention
might be feasible. Russell instantly answered that, in any case,
he wanted to intervene and should call a Cabinet for the purpose.
Palmerston hesitated; Russell insisted; Granville protested.
Meanwhile the rebel army was defeated at Antietam, September 17,
and driven out of Maryland. Then Gladstone, October 7, tried to
force Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as a fait
accompli. Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir George
Cornewall Lewis to contradict Gladstone and treated him sharply
in the press, at the very moment when Russell was calling a
Cabinet to make Gladstone's words good. On October 23, Russell
assured Adams that no change in policy was now proposed. On the
same day he had proposed it, and was voted down. Instantly
Napoleon III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone with a
proposition which had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to
replace America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence on
Europe, and to replace England in her old sovereignty of the
seas, if Palmerston would support France in Mexico. The young
student of diplomacy, knowing Palmerston, must have taken for
granted that Palmerston inspired this motion and would support
it; knowing Russell and his Whig antecedents, he would conceive
that Russell must oppose it; knowing Gladstone and his lofty
principles, he would not doubt that Gladstone violently denounced
the scheme. If education was worth a straw, this was the only
arrangement of persons that a trained student would imagine
possible, and it was the arrangement actually assumed by nine men
out of ten, as history. In truth, each valuation was false.
Palmerston never showed favor to the scheme and gave it only "a
feeble and half-hearted support." Russell gave way without
resolutely fighting out "his battle." The only resolute,
vehement, conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and
Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.
Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders,
but to him the best part of life was thrown away if he learned
such a lesson wrong. Henry James had not yet taught the world to
read a volume for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his
burning-glass turned on alternate sides of the same figure.
Psychological study was still simple, and at worst -- or at best
-- English character was never subtile. Surely no one would
believe that complexity was the trait that confused the student
of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. Under a very strong light
human nature will always appear complex and full of
contradictions, but the British statesman would appear, on the
whole, among the least complex of men.
Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by
contrast, be called complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and
Gladstone deceived only by their simplicity. Russell was the most
interesting to a young man because his conduct seemed most
statesmanlike. Every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to
November, 1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the
Union. The only point in Russell's character about which the
student thought no doubt to be possible was its want of good
faith. It was thoroughly dishonest, but strong. Habitually
Russell said one thing and did another. He seemed unconscious of
his own contradictions even when his opponents pointed them out,
as they were much in the habit of doing, in the strongest
language. As the student watched him deal with the Civil War in
America, Russell alone showed persistence, even obstinacy, in a
definite determination, which he supported, as was necessary, by
the usual definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of
the falsehoods; on the contrary, he was vain of his own insight
in detecting them; but he was wholly upset by the idea that
Russell should think himself true.
Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old school,
clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods --
dishonest but strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no
objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else
honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought
him true, but officially, in practice, treated him as false.
Punch, before 1862, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling
lies, and afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education
stopped there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered
a rational explanation of Earl Russell.
Palmerston was simple -- so simple as to mislead the student
altogether -- but scarcely more consistent. The world thought him
positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be
cautious, careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for
pugnacious and quarrelsome; the "Lives" of Russell, Gladstone,
and Granville show him to have been good-tempered, conciliatory,
avoiding quarrels. He surprised the Minister by refusing to
pursue his attack on General Butler. He tried to check Russell.
He scolded Gladstone. He discouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli
none of the English statesmen were so cautious as he in talking
of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made no professions;
concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The
most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that,
after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction
of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit himself in
error, and to consent in spirit -- for by that time he was nearly
as dead as any of them -- to beg his pardon.
Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions.
The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a
reduction to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could
reach in 1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone
admitted, avowed, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which
brought all reason and all hope of education to a still-stand: --
I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially
since it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had
outlived half a century . . . I declared in the heat of the
American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation. . . .
Strange to say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be made
by a Minister of the Crown with no authority other than his
own, was not due to any feeling of partisanship for the South
or hostility to the North. . . . I really, though most
strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all
America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end.
. . . That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the
facts was the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive
the gross impropriety of such an utterance from a Cabinet
Minister of a power allied in blood and language, and bound to
loyal neutrality; the case being further exaggerated by the
fact that we were already, so to speak, under indictment before
the world for not (as was alleged) having strictly enforced the
laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruisers. My offence
was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness, and
with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it,
that my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very
severe blame. It illustrates vividly that incapacity which my
mind so long retained, and perhaps still exhibits, an
incapacity of viewing subjects all round. . . .
Long and patiently -- more than patiently -- sympathetically,
did the private secretary, forty years afterwards in the twilight
of a life of study, read and re-read and reflect upon this
confession. Then, it seemed, he had seen nothing correctly at the
time. His whole theory of conspiracy -- of policy -- of logic and
connection in the affairs of man, resolved itself into
"incredible grossness." He felt no rancor, for he had won the
game; he forgave, since he must admit, the "incapacity of viewing
subjects all round" which had so nearly cost him life and
fortune; he was willing even to believe. He noted, without
irritation, that Mr. Gladstone, in his confession, had not
alluded to the understanding between Russell, Palmerston, and
himself; had even wholly left out his most "incredible" act, his
ardent support of Napoleon's policy, a policy which even
Palmerston and Russell had supported feebly, with only half a
heart. All this was indifferent. Granting, in spite of evidence,
that Gladstone had no set plan of breaking up the Union; that he
was party to no conspiracy; that he saw none of the results of
his acts which were clear to every one else; granting in short
what the English themselves seemed at last to conclude -- that
Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging on
senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve -- what sort of
education should have been the result of it? How should it have
affected one's future opinions and acts?
Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are
rough; its judgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not
have affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of
the individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
individual -- a single will or intention -- bent on breaking up
the Union "as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister
would still have found his interest in thinking Russell friendly
and Palmerston hostile. The individual would still have been
identical with the mass. The problem would have been the same;
the answer equally obscure. Every student would, like the private
secretary, answer for himself alone.
CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and
seldom credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his
own. Earl Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy
united them; and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without
being amused by his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart
from this shadowy personal relation, no doubt the Minister was
diplomatically right; he had nothing to lose and everything to
gain by making a friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether
Russell were true or false mattered less, because, in either
case, the American Legation could act only as though he were
false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined effort to
betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely used
stronger expressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been
greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier's hint of collusion with
the rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to
hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the
Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly,
to treat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so
unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington
Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last
effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week
elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating
his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain language
for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to
understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had
affected it; this was one of the points that greatly interested a
student, but young men have a passion for regarding their elders
as senile, which was only in part warranted in this instance by
observing that Russell's generation were mostly senile from
youth. They had never got beyond 1815 Both Palmerston and Russell
were in this case. Their senility was congenital, like
Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions, which
caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not
conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams
from the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on
the defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he
showed mere confusion and helplessness.
Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between
Russell and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal
negligence. If, by an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil
enough to admit that the escape of the Alabama had been due to
criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard
to the ironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one
could be so simple as to believe that two armored ships-of-war
could be built publicly, under the eyes of the Government, and go
to sea like the Alabama, without active and incessant collusion.
The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumed ignorance,
the more violently in the end, the Minister would have to tear it
off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl Russell,
he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with him
if this crisis were allowed to arrive.
As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself
for action. A campaign more beautiful -- better suited for
training the mind of a youth eager for training -- has not often
unrolled itself for study, from the beginning, before a young man
perched in so commanding a position. Very slowly, indeed, after
two years of solitude, one began to feel the first faint flush of
new and imperial life. One was twenty-five years old, and quite
ready to assert it; some of one's friends were wearing stars on
their collars; some had won stars of a more enduring kind. At
moments one's breath came quick. One began to dream the sensation
of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like vertigo, for
an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed,
doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that of any
Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the armies in
the field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of
what might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel
that, somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking
shape; that it was massed and guided as it had not been before.
Men seemed to have learned their business -- at a cost that
ruined -- and perhaps too late. A private secretary knew better
than most people how much of the new power was to be swung in
London, and almost exactly when; but the diplomatic campaign had
to wait for the military campaign to lead. The student could only
study.
Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows
began to fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to
listen with incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one
after another, with the precision of machinery, the opposing
mass, the world shivered. Such development of power was unknown.
The magnificent resistance and the return shocks heightened the
suspense. During the July days Londoners were stupid with
unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.
An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for
one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at
home; but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One
had ample time to watch the process, and had even a little time
to gloat over the repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and
Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened
that Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some small
reception at the house of Monckton Milnes. He went early in order
to exchange a word or two of congratulation before the rooms
should fill, and on arriving he found only the ladies in the
drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.
Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of the
Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young American
friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms
about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth
who knew too little to realize the passions of 1863 -- backed by
those of 1813 -- and reenforced by those of 1763 -- might
conceive that such publicity embarrassed a private secretary who
came from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening, for
the first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking of
himself. He was thinking of Delane, whose eye caught his, at the
moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane probably regarded it as a
piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard of young Adams, and
never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in the Times;
he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind of the
American Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of
all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of
Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed
ideas. Even if he had read Adams's thought, he would have felt
for it only the usual amused British contempt for all that he had
not been taught at school. It needed a whole generation for the
Times to reach Milnes's standpoint.
Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured
him that he regarded his own personal score as cleared off --
sufficiently settled, then and there -- because his father had
assumed the debt, and was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself.
"You come next!" would have been the friendly warning. For nearly
a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging
itself for the collision between the Legation and Delane who
stood behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams had been steadily
strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view of the final
struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent Affair. The
work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly complete.
No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had
as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.
Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to
press assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not
an additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the
Assistant Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work
that the Minister did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week
would have done the work as well or better, but the Minister
could trust no clerk; without express authority he could admit no
one into the Legation; he strained a point already by admitting
his son. Congress and its committees were the proper judges of
what was best for the public service, and if the arrangement
seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private secretary
who profited by it more than they did. A great staff would have
suppressed him. The whole Legation was a sort of improvised,
volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. He was
rather better off than the rest, because he was invisible and
unknown. Better or worse, he did his work with the others, and if
the secretaries made any remarks about Congress, they made no
complaints, and knew that none would have received a moment's
attention.
If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular
service, he had done great things for its support. If the
Minister had no secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he
had a well-organized press; efficient legal support; and a swarm
of social allies permeating all classes. All he needed was a
victory in the field, and Secretary Stanton undertook that part
of diplomacy. Vicksburg and Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at
the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was ready to deal with Earl
Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Delane, or any
one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity of the case,
was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.
Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was
history, and had nothing to do with education. The private
secretary copied the notes into his private books, and that was
all the share he had in the matter, except to talk in private.
No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in
a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the
affair was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance
to measure the motive forces of men; their qualities of
character; their foresight; their tenacity of purpose.
In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the
rams. Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his
efforts for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the
Legation in September, 1863 the Minister must surely have
admitted that Russell had, from the first, meant to force his
plan of intervention on his colleagues. Every separate step since
April, 1861, led to this final coercion. Although Russell's
hostile activity of 1862 was still secret -- and remained secret
for some five-and-twenty years -- his animus seemed to be made
clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel armaments. Little
by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of hope came the
raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every
rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded with
connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous
sentence: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your
lordship that this is war!"
What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what
the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his
education. Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory
paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have
continued thus:--
"It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it
is the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying
action. 3d. Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that
'this is war,' but is pointing it out to the world, to complete
the record."
This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the
private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact
statement with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister
announced that a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as
clerk, the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic
propriety, merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or
rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order to make clear the
issue. The war was Russell's war--Adams only accepted it.
Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the
Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious
secretaries that "instructions have been issued which will
prevent the departure of the two ironclad vessels from
Liverpool." The members of the modest Legation in Portland Place
accepted it as Grant had accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg.
The private secretary conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had
struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel left on the
Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the rebel
right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of
the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he
were ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and
death like this; and though the private secretary should covet
and attain every office in the gift of President or people, he
would never again find education to compare with the
life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half struggle
in London, as it had racked and thumb-screwed him in its shifting
phases; but its practical value as education turned on his
correctness of judgment in measuring the men and their forces. He
felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because they
represented traditional England and an English policy,
respectable enough in itself, but which, for four generations,
every Adams had fought and exploited as the chief source of his
political fortunes. As he understood it, Russell had followed
this policy steadily, ably, even vigorously, and had brought it
to the moment of execution. Then he had met wills stronger than
his own, and, after persevering to the last possible instant, had
been beaten. Lord North and George Canning had a like experience.
This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it
was also the idea of his Government. For once, the volunteer
secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the
self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and
is proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this
case the English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the
State Department as the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department,
and more decisive. It was well planned, well prepared, and well
executed. He could never discover a mistake in it. Possibly he
was biassed by personal interest, but his chief reason for
trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself to be one
of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it. When
others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their
opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were
talking about, and could not be taught without living over again
the London life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely
strong and steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to
Russell or Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power,
patience and steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two
years and a half in their plan for breaking up the Union, and had
yielded at last only in the jaws of war. After a long and
desperate struggle, the American Minister had trumped their best
card and won the game.
Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none.
At every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the
more he was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with
growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of
Adams's whole contention, that from the first he meant to break
up the Union. Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort;
that he had meant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that
he did not know what he meant. Driven from one defence after
another, he pleaded at last, like Gladstone, that he had no
defence. Concealing all he could conceal -- burying in profound
secrecy his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of 1862
-- he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith. What was
worse for the private secretary, to the total derision and
despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result
of combined practice, experience, and theory -- he proved it.
Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's
death was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in
1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889.
During the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872,
his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and
he had been compelled to see England pay more than L3,000,000
penalty for his errors. On the other hand, he brought forward --
or his biographer for him -- evidence tending to prove that he
was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in spite of
appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or policy,
as far as concerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his
nature. Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.
In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of
admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led
even his old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped
Gladstone's; but this was not enough for the student of diplomacy
who had made a certain theory his law of life, and wanted to hold
Russell up against himself; to show that he had foresight and
persistence of which he was unaware. The effort became hopeless
when the biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that
Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down
once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could
unravel the skein.
Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from
Gotha, 17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond
Gladstone's plea in excuse for his speech in pursuance of the
same effort, that it was "the most singular and palpable error,"
"the least excusable," "a mistake of incredible grossness," which
passed defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of
the public for his speech, he attempted no excuse for Lord
Russell who led him into the "incredible grossness" of announcing
the Foreign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence, "singular
and palpable," was not the speech alone, but its cause -- the
policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed . . . I
really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of
friendliness." Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell
supposed nothing of the sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most
strangely believed" in any proposition so obviously and palpably
absurd, nor did Napoleon delude himself with philanthropy.
Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up policy, speech,
motives, and persons, as though he were trying to confuse chiefly
himself.
There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in
1863, as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on
September 1 that he could not interfere in any way with those
vessels, and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration
of war on September 5. A student held that, in this refusal, he
was merely following his policy of September, 1862, and of every
step he had taken since 1861.
The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is
convincing. The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the
known opinion of the law-officers that the statute did not apply,
and a jury would not convict. Minister Adams replied that, in
this case, the statute should be amended, or the ships stopped by
exercise of the political power. Bethell rejoined that this would
be a violation of neutrality; one must preserve the status quo.
Tacitly Russell connived with Laird, and, had he meant to
interfere, he was bound to warn Laird that the defect of the
statute would no longer protect him, but he allowed the builders
to go on till the ships were ready for sea. Then, on September 3,
two days before Mr. Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to
Lord Palmerston begging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen
who have contracted for the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so
very suspicious," -- he began, and this he actually wrote in good
faith and deep confidence to Lord Palmerston, his chief, calling
"the conduct" of the rebel agents "suspicious" when no one else
in Europe or America felt any suspicion about it, because the
whole question turned not on the rams, but on the technical scope
of the Foreign Enlistment Act, -- "that I have thought it
necessary to direct that they should be detained," not, of
course, under the statute, but on the ground urged by the
American Minister, of international obligation above the statute.
"The Solicitor General has been consulted and concurs in the
measure as one of policy though not of strict law. We shall thus
test the law, and, if we have to pay damages, we have satisfied
the opinion which prevails here as well as in America that that
kind of neutral hostility should not be allowed to go on without
some attempt to stop it."
For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of
Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground,
after two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have
roused Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well
earned by Russell's old attacks on himself, Palmerston met the
appeal with wonderful loyalty. "On consulting the law officers he
found that there was no lawful ground for meddling with the
ironclads," or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust
neither his law officers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he
suggested buying the ships for the British Navy. As proof of
"criminal negligence" in the past, this suggestion seemed
decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in other
troubles of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the
American Minister. He should have done so at once, on September
3. Instead he waited till September 4, and then merely said that
the matter was under "serious and anxious consideration." This
note did not reach the Legation till three o'clock on the
afternoon of September 5 -- after the "superfluous" declaration
of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the
Lairds: had cost his Ministry the price of two ironclads, besides
the Alabama Claims -- say, in round numbers, twenty million
dollars -- and had put himself in the position of appearing to
yield only to a threat of war. Finally he wrote to the Admiralty
a letter which, from the American point of view, would have
sounded youthful from an Eton schoolboy: --
September 14, 1863.
MY DEAR DUKE: --
It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads
building at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the
blockade. They belong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris. If you will
offer to buy them on the part of the Admiralty you will get
money's worth if he accepts your offer; and if he does not, it
will be presumptive proof that they are already bought by the
Confederates. I should state that we have suggested to the
Turkish Government to buy them; but you can easily settle that
matter with the Turks. . . .
The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have
been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of
difficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself
under the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless,
these letters upset from top to bottom the results of the private
secretary's diplomatic education forty years after he had
supposed it complete. They made a picture different from anything
he had conceived and rendered worthless his whole painful
diplomatic experience.
To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use
in attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether
he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much of
it as he wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone" (II,
464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for
curious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that
politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to
comprehend"; and he added, by way of strengthening it: "For my
own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood,
above one or two."
Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.
Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the
American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient
result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.
CHAPTER XII
ECCENTRICITY (1863)
KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political
education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood
of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English
human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris,
such a habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the
instincts of native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided,
eccentric, systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical.
The less one knew of it, the better.
This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to
penetrate a Boston mind -- it would, indeed, have been shut out
by instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration -- rested on an
experience which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to
think conclusive -- for him. That it should be conclusive for any
one else never occurred to him, since he had no thought of
educating anybody else. For him -- alone -- the less English
education he got, the better!
For several years, under the keenest incitement to
watchfulness, he observed the English mind in contact with itself
and other minds. Especially with the American the contact was
interesting because the limits and defects of the American mind
were one of the favorite topics of the European. From the
old-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an
economic thinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line.
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might
exasperate a pine forest. The English mind disliked the French
mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile,
but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was
not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow,
and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical,
sharp, and direct.
The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most
struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity.
Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with
close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for
sake of the eccentricity itself.
The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or
dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence
to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and
when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by
epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to
become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English
society as well as its chief terror.
The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but
Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at
all, and that his pictures of English society were exact and
good-natured. The American, who could not believe it, fell back
on Dickens, who, at all events, had the vice of exaggeration to
extravagance, but Dickens's English audience thought the
exaggeration rather in manner or style, than in types. Mr.
Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed
till his face was distorted -- not because Dundreary was
exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that
Gladstone had seen -- or might have seen -- in any club in Pall
Mall. Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained
little else.
Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps
it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston
thought so. The Bostonian called it national character -- native
vigor -- robustness -- honesty -- courage. He respected and
feared it. British self-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it
was, seemed to him a better and nobler thing than the acuteness
of the Yankee or the polish of the Parisian. Perhaps he was
right.
These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no
settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and
amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Whatever others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the
national eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to
correct it. The savage satires of Dickens and the gentler
ridicule of Matthew Arnold against the British middle class were
but a part of the rebellion, for the middle class were no worse
than their neighbors in the eyes of an American in 1863; they
were even a very little better in the sense that one could appeal
to their interests, while a university man, like Gladstone, stood
outside of argument. From none of them could a young American
afford to borrow ideas.
The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by
regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in
the shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him
hesitate; he saw his own national type -- his father, Weed,
Evarts, for instance -- deal with the British, and show itself
certainly not the weaker; certainly sometimes the stronger.
Biassed though he were, he could hardly be biassed to such a
degree as to mistake the effects of force on others, and while --
labor as he might -- Earl Russell and his state papers seemed
weak to a secretary, he could not see that they seemed strong to
Russell's own followers. Russell might be dishonest or he might
be merely obtuse -- the English type might be brutal or might be
only stupid -- but strong, in either case, it was not, nor did it
seem strong to Englishmen.
Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply
interested in deciding whether it was always a weakness.
Evidently, on the hustings or in Parliament, among
eccentricities, eccentricity was at home; but in private society
the question was not easy to answer. That English society was
infinitely more amusing because of its eccentricities, no one
denied. Barring the atrocious insolence and brutality which
Englishmen and especially Englishwomen showed to each other --
very rarely, indeed, to foreigners -- English society was much
more easy and tolerant than American. One must expect to be
treated with exquisite courtesy this week and be totally forgotten
the next, but this was the way of the world, and education
consisted in learning to turn one's back on others with the same
unconscious indifference that others showed among themselves. The
smart of wounded vanity lasted no long time with a young man about
town who had little vanity to smart, and who, in his own country,
would have found himself in no better position. He had nothing to
complain of. No one was ever brutal to him. On the contrary, he
was much better treated than ever he was likely to be in Boston --
let alone New York or Washington -- and if his reception varied
inconceivably between extreme courtesy and extreme neglect, it
merely proved that he had become, or was becoming, at home. Not
from a sense of personal griefs or disappointments did he labor
over this part of the social problem, but only because his
education was becoming English, and the further it went, the less
it promised.
By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized
with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to
rebellion -- when foreign -- and it felt particular confidence in
the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes --
foreign rebellion of English blood -- which came nearer ideal
eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians
or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of
rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach
themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the English leaders
on the Northern side were marked eccentrics. William E. Forster
was a practical, hard-headed Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in
politics took shape as working arrangements on an economical
base. Cobden, considering the one-sided conditions of his life,
was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was stronger in his
expressions than either of them, but with all his self-assertion
he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He did not,
like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously earnest,"
as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every question"; he
was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative of the old
Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend inconsistencies.
Monckton Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chiefly by
those who did not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only
ideas a little in advance of the time; his manner was eccentric,
but not his mind, as any one could see who read a page of his
poetry. None of them, except Milnes, was a university man. As a
rule, the Legation was troubled very little, if at all, by
indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions among its English
friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical, well
considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all
rebels, and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed
by old Lord Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a July
4th reception at the Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his
old credit as "Attorney General to Mr. Madison." The Church was
rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The
universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most
public confidence -- like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey -- took infinite pains to be
neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers,
as well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a
vast majority of the English people seemed to follow the
professional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took
that direction; Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and
Gladstone, threw their sympathies on the side which they should
naturally have opposed, and did so for no reason except their
eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots and Yorkshiremen were
cautious.
This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first
cause of this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No
one understood why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent
for London at the same time that he made so good a choice as Mr.
Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to
send to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason. Possibly
Mason had a certain amount of common sense, but he seemed to have
nothing else, and in London society he counted merely as one
eccentric more. He enjoyed a great opportunity; he might even
have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with all society at his
feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and made the
social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but Mr.
Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with
Palmerston; he drove Russell off the field; he swept the board
before Cockburn; he overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a
finger against Mason, who became his bulwark of defence.
Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake.
Neither could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must
have been unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason,
President Davis sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to
Russia. Some twenty years later, in the shifting search for the
education he never found, Adams became closely intimate at
Washington with Lamar, then Senator from Mississippi, who had
grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable and most amiable
Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in social
charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all
his Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps
this was a reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others,
on a futile mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better
in London, in place of Mason. London society would have delighted
in him; his stories would have won success; his manners would
have made him loved; his oratory would have swept every audience;
even Monckton Milnes could never have resisted the temptation of
having him to breakfast between Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop
of Oxford.
Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate management
or criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject that
amused him was his English allies. At that moment -- the early
summer of 1863 -- the rebel party in England were full of
confidence, and felt strong enough to challenge the American
Legation to a show of power. They knew better than the Legation
what they could depend upon: that the law officers and
commissioners of customs at Liverpool dared not prosecute the
ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone were
ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon
would offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they
owned Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were
building their ships. The political member of the Laird firm was
Lindsay, about whom the whole web of rebel interests clung --
rams, cruisers, munitions, and Confederate loan; social
introductions and parliamentary tactics. The firm of Laird, with
a certain dignity, claimed to be champion of England's navy; and
public opinion, in the summer of 1863, still inclined towards
them.
Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the
managers must have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as
their champion an eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort
of Brougham of Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse
temper. Mr. Roebuck had been a tribune of the people, and, like
tribunes of most other peoples, in growing old, had grown
fatuous. He was regarded by the friends of the Union as rather a
comical personage -- a favorite subject for Punch to laugh at --
with a bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even more than common
by the political epidemic of egotism. In all England they could
have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own case.
No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet.
the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let
Roebuck represent them and take charge of their interests.
With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern
except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Commons on
June 30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck's motion to
recognize the Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no anxiety,
having Vicksburg already in its pocket, and Bright and Forster to
say so; but the private secretary went down and was admitted
under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content,
while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and
tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned,
toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary
felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time,
by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him
too, and he knew how it was done. The manner counted for more
than the words. The scene was interesting, but the result was not
in doubt.
All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which,
little by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the
House of Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began
with Lamar's failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his
consequent detention in Paris waiting instructions. The motion to
recognize the Confederacy was about to be made, and, in prospect
of the debate, Mr. Lindsay collected a party at his villa on the
Thames to bring the rebel agents into relations with Roebuck.
Lamar was sent for, and came. After much conversation of a
general sort, such as is the usual object or resource of the
English Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by way
of showing interest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked
Roebuck whether he expected Bright to take part in the debate:
"No, sir!" said Roebuck sententiously; "Bright and I have met
before. It was the old story -- the story of the sword-fish and
the whale! NO, sir! Mr. Bright will not cross swords with me
again!"
Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the House
on the appointed evening, and was placed under the gallery, on
the right, where he listened to Roebuck and followed the debate
with such enjoyment as an experienced debater feels in these
contests, until, as he said, he became aware that a man, with a
singularly rich voice and imposing manner, had taken the floor,
and was giving Roebuck the most deliberate and tremendous
pounding he ever witnessed, "until at last," concluded Lamar, "it
dawned on my mind that the sword-fish was getting the worst of
it."
Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself
rather than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been
unpleasantly common in the experience of the rebel agents. They
were surrounded by cranks of the worst English species, who
distorted their natural eccentricities and perverted their
judgment. Roebuck may have been an extreme case, since he was
actually in his dotage, yet this did not prevent the Lairds from
accepting his lead, or the House from taking him seriously.
Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England, to extreme
confidence; sometimes it seemed a recommendation; and unless it
caused financial loss, it rather helped popularity.
The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of
Bright's courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern
people themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing
want of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such
ignorance of the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational
as that of the rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the
courage of a prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty
nearly every man in England that could be reached by a blow, and
when he could not reach the individual he struck the class, or
when the class was too small for him, the whole people of
England. At times he had the whole country on his back. He could
not act on the defensive; his mind required attack. Even among
friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were
denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his
phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded
his opponents, real or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at
dull heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.
One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St.
James's Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient
efforts to unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American
platform. The secretary went to the meeting and made a report
which reposes somewhere on file in the State Department to this
day, as harmless as such reports should be; but it contained no
mention of what interested young Adams most -- Bright's
psychology. With singular skill and oratorical power, Bright
managed at the outset, in his opening paragraph, to insult or
outrage every class of Englishman commonly considered
respectable, and, for fear of any escaping, he insulted them
repeatedly under consecutive heads. The rhetorical effect was
tremendous:--
"Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American
contest," he began in his massive, deliberate tones; "and every
morning with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses
the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting
spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty million of
men happy and prosperous, without emperors -- without king
(cheers) -- without the surroundings of a court (renewed
cheers)--without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in
intellect and virtue -- without State bishops and State priests,
those vendors of the love that works salvation (cheers) --
without great armies and great navies -- without a great debt and
great taxes -- and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen
to old Europe if this great experiment should succeed."
An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed,
in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than
Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed
artifice and hurt his oratory. The audience cheered furiously,
and the private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind,
for he knew how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw
Bright talk republican principles before Trades-Unions; but,
while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason to doubt the courage
of a man who, after quarrelling with the Trades-Unions, quarreled
with all the world outside the Trades-Unions, he did feel a doubt
whether to class Bright as eccentric or conventional. Every one
called Bright "un-English," from Lord Palmerston to William E.
Forster; but to an American he seemed more English than any of
his critics. He was a liberal hater, and what he hated he reviled
after the manner of Milton, but he was afraid of no one. He was
almost the only man in England, or, for that matter, in Europe,
who hated Palmerston and was not afraid of him, or of the press
or the pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He
loathed the whole fabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham
aristocracy, and sham socialism. He had the British weakness of
believing only in himself and his own conventions. In all this,
an American saw, if one may make the distinction, much racial
eccentricity, but little that was personal. Bright was singularly
well poised; but he used singularly strong language.
Long afterwards, in 1880, Adams happened to be living again in
London for a season, when James Russell Lowell was transferred
there as Minister; and as Adams's relations with Lowell had
become closer and more intimate with years, he wanted the new
Minister to know some of his old friends. Bright was then in the
Cabinet, and no longer the most radical member even there, but he
was still a rare figure in society. He came to dinner, along with
Sir Francis Doyle and Sir Robert Cunliffe, and as usual did most
of the talking. As usual also, he talked of the things most on
his mind. Apparently it must have been some reform of the
criminal law which the Judges opposed, that excited him, for at
the end of dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the table
in his old way, and ended with a superb denunciation of the
Bench, spoken in his massive manner, as though every word were a
hammer, smashing what it struck:--
"For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the Bench,
condemning to the penalty of death every man, woman, and child
who stole property to the value of five shillings; and, during
all that time, not one Judge ever remonstrated against the law.
We English are a nation of brutes, and ought to be exterminated
to the last man."
As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room,
Adams said to Lowell that Bright was very fine. "Yes!" replied
Lowell, " but too violent! "
Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew
his Englishmen better than Lowell did -- better than England did.
He knew what amount of violence in language was necessary to
drive an idea into a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that
no violence was enough to affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire
peasant. Bright kept his own head cool and clear. He was not
excited; he never betrayed excitement. As for his denunciation of
the English Bench, it was a very old story, not original with
him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a commonplace
generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted by
foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be
treated only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were
probably not very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright
said that the French, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a
nation of brutes and ought to be exterminated, no one would have
found fault; the whole human race, according to the highest
authority, has been exterminated once already for the same
reason, and only the rainbow protects them from a repetition of
it. What shocked Lowell was that he denounced his own people.
Adams felt no moral obligation to defend Judges, who, as far as
he knew, were the only class of society specially adapted to
defend themselves; but he was curious -- even anxious -- as a
point of education, to decide for himself whether Bright's
language was violent for its purpose. He thought not. Perhaps
Cobden did better by persuasion, but that was another matter. Of
course, even Englishmen sometimes complained of being so
constantly told that they were brutes and hypocrites, although
they were told little else by their censors, and bore it, on the
whole, meekly; but the fact that it was true in the main troubled
the ten-pound voter much less than it troubled Newman, Gladstone,
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally
disliked by his victims, but not distrusted. They never doubted
what he would do next, as they did with John Russell, Gladstone,
and Disraeli. He betrayed no one, and he never advanced an
opinion in practical matters which did not prove to be practical.
The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual
opposites of Bright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest
and most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political
economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers
of de Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were
timid -- with good reason -- and timidity, which is high wisdom
in philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action.
Numbers of these men haunted London society, all tending to
free-thinking, but never venturing much freedom of thought. Like
the anti-slavery doctrinaires of the forties and fifties, they
became mute and useless when slavery struck them in the face. For
type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosen Henry
Reeve, at least to the extent of biography. He was a bulky figure
in society, always friendly, good-natured, obliging, and useful;
almost as universal as Milnes and more busy. As editor of the
Edinburgh Review he had authority and even power, although the
Review and the whole Whig doctrinaire school had begun -- as the
French say -- to date; and of course the literary and artistic
sharpshooters of 1867 -- like Frank Palgrave -- frothed and
foamed at the mere mention of Reeve's name. Three-fourths of
their fury was due only to his ponderous manner. London society
abused its rights of personal criticism by fixing on every too
conspicuous figure some word or phrase that stuck to it. Every
one had heard of Mrs. Grote as "the origin of the word
grotesque." Every one had laughed at the story of Reeve
approaching Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat florid manner,
asking in his literary dialect how her husband the historian was:
"And how is the learned Grotius?" "Pretty well, thank you,
Puffendorf! " One winced at the word, as though it were a drawing
of Forain.
No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been
charged with want of moral courage. He proved his courage
afterwards by publishing the "Greville Memoirs," braving the
displeasure of the Queen. Yet the Edinburgh Review and its editor
avoided taking sides except where sides were already fixed.
Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh
Review; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and
Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of
oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless
hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he
never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it might
encourage.
The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that
eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should adopt
English thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion was
correct, yet, as usual, the conclusion was wrong. The years of
Palmerston's last Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of
truce -- of arrested development. The British system like the
French, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the
British mind shown itself so decousu -- so unravelled, at sea,
floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities
had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church.
England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to clearing away
only a part of the debris. A young American in 1863 could see
little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not
foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England
in its wake, was to vanish in 1870. He was in dead-water, and the
parti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though he
were the ancient mariner, and they saurians of the prime.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
MINISTER ADAMS'S success in stopping the rebel rams fixed his
position once for all in English society. From that moment he
could afford to drop the character of diplomatist, and assume
what, for an American Minister in London, was an exclusive
diplomatic advantage, the character of a kind of American Peer of
the Realm. The British never did things by halves. Once they
recognized a man's right to social privileges, they accepted him
as one of themselves. Much as Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli were
accepted as leaders of Her Majesty's domestic Opposition,
Minister Adams had a rank of his own as a kind of leader of Her
Majesty's American Opposition. Even the Times conceded it. The
years of struggle were over, and Minister Adams rapidly gained a
position which would have caused his father or grandfather to
stare with incredulous envy.
This Anglo-American form of diplomacy was chiefly undiplomatic,
and had the peculiar effect of teaching a habit of diplomacy
useless or mischievous everywhere but in London. Nowhere else in
the world could one expect to figure in a role so unprofessional.
The young man knew no longer what character he bore. Private
secretary in the morning, son in the afternoon, young man about
town in the evening, the only character he never bore was that of
diplomatist, except when he wanted a card to some great function.
His diplomatic education was at an end; he seldom met a diplomat,
and never had business with one; he could be of no use to them,
or they to him; but he drifted inevitably into society, and, do
what he might, his next education must be one of English social
life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilemmas, he reached
his twenty-sixth birthday without the power of earning five
dollars in any occupation. His friends in the army were almost as
badly off, but even army life ruined a young man less fatally
than London society. Had he been rich, this form of ruin would
have mattered nothing; but the young men of 1865 were none of
them rich; all had to earn a living; yet they had reached high
positions of responsibility and power in camps and Courts,
without a dollar of their own and with no tenure of office.
Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously
enough, he failed here also. From the European or English point
of view, he had no social experience, and never got it. Minister
Adams happened on a political interregnum owing to Lord
Palmerston's personal influence from 1860 to 1865; but this
political interregnum was less marked than the social still-stand
during the same years. The Prince Consort was dead; the Queen had
retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In its best days,
Victorian society had never been "smart." During the forties,
under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be
simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste
of Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of
Queen Victoria. Style lingered in the background with the
powdered footman behind the yellow chariot, but speaking socially
the Queen had no style save what she inherited. Balmoral was a
startling revelation of royal taste. Nothing could be worse than
the toilettes at Court unless it were the way they were worn.
One's eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but they were heirlooms,
and if any lady appeared well dressed, she was either a foreigner
or "fast." Fashion was not fashionable in London until the
Americans and the Jews were let loose. The style of London
toilette universal in 1864 was grotesque, like Monckton Milnes on
horseback in Rotten Row.
Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the
society of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other
causes, young Adams never got the full training of such style as
still existed. The embarrassments of his first few seasons
socially ruined him. His own want of experience prevented his
asking introductions to the ladies who ruled society; his want of
friends prevented his knowing who these ladies were; and he had
every reason to expect snubbing if he put himself in evidence.
This sensitiveness was thrown away on English society, where men
and women treated each others' advances much more brutally than
those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private secretary
too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman. He was
not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old ones, felt
awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not
precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told
so.
If there was in those days a country house in England which had
a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right
to consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady
Margaret Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting by
her side -- not for his own merits -- Henry Adams heard her say
to herself in her languid and liberal way, with her rich voice
and musing manner, looking into her tea-cup: "I don't think I
care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken, not so much on his own
account as on hers, the young man could only execute himself as
gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make one small
exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident, that
she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew
that, except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in
fact a foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she
should like him, or any other foreigner, unless it were because
she was bored by natives. She seemed to feel that her
indifference needed a reason to excuse itself in her own eyes,
and she showed the subconscious sympathy of the Irish nature
which never feels itself perfectly at home even in England. She,
too, was some shadowy shade un-English.
Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the
private secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till
he found his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt
himself in society, and he never knew definitely what was meant
as society by those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a
score of societies which seemed quite independent of each other.
The smartest was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange.
The largest was the sporting world, also unknown to him except
through the talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these
lay groups of nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like
Evarts, frequented legal circles where one still sat over the
wine and told anecdotes of the bench and bar; but he himself
never set eyes on a judge except when his father took him to call
on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old Lord Campbell, both
abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church and the Bishops formed
several societies which no secretary ever saw except as an
interloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical
and surgical professions; City people; artists; county families;
the Scotch, and indefinite other subdivisions of society existed,
which were as strange to each other as they were to Adams. At the
end of eight or ten seasons in London society he professed to
know less about it, or how to enter it, than he did when he made
his first appearance at Miss Burdett Coutts's in May, 1861.
Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him. An
American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished
nor gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to think of
society at large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred were
useless to him, a greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the
question of getting into -- or getting out of -- society which
troubled young foreigners greatly, settled itself after three or
four years of painful speculation. Society had no unity; one
wandered about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom
cab, to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.
Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the
accounts of his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or
George Smalley, and of various ladies who reigned in the
seventies, he inclined to think that he knew very little about
it. Certain great houses and certain great functions of course he
attended, like every one else who could get cards, but even of
these the number was small that kept an interest or helped
education. In seven years he could remember only two that seemed
to have any meaning for him, and he never knew what that meaning
was. Neither of the two was official; neither was English in
interest; and both were scandals to the philosopher while they
scarcely enlightened men of the world.
One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire House
if asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the usual
people. The private secretary was standing among the rest, when
Mme. de Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the Second
Empire. How beautiful she may have been, or indeed what sort of
beauty she was, Adams never knew, because the company, consisting
of the most refined and aristocratic society in the world,
instantly formed a lane, and stood in ranks to stare at her,
while those behind mounted on chairs to look over their
neighbors' heads; so that the lady walked through this polite
mob, stared completely out of countenance, and fled the house at
once. This was all!
The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's
pictures of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his
gray capote over his red shirt, received all London, and three
duchesses literally worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events,
a private secretary had surely caught the last and highest touch
of social experience; but what it meant -- what social, moral, or
mental development it pointed out to the searcher of truth -- was
not a matter to be treated fully by a leader in the Morning Post
or even by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de Castiglione and
Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for simple
measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an
ordered social system tending to orderly development -- in London
or elsewhere -- was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or Victor
Hugo, but was beyond any process yet reached by the education of
Henry Adams, who would probably, even then, have rejected, as
superficial or supernatural, all the views taken by any of the
company who looked on with him at these two interesting and
perplexing sights.
From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his
road through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to
think in these years, 1860-65, that the nicest distinction
between the very best society and the second-best, was their
attitude towards royalty. The one regarded royalty as a bore, and
avoided it, or quietly said that the Queen had never been in
society. The same thing might have been said of fully half the
peerage. Adams never knew even the names of half the rest; he
never exchanged ten words with any member of the royal family; he
never knew any one in those years who showed interest in any
member of the royal family, or who would have given five
shillings for the opinion of any royal person on any subject; or
cared to enter any royal or noble presence, unless the house was
made attractive by as much social effort as would have been
necessary in other countries where no rank existed. No doubt, as
one of a swarm, young Adams slightly knew various gilded youth
who frequented balls and led such dancing as was most in vogue,
but they seemed to set no value on rank; their anxiety was only
to know where to find the best partners before midnight, and the
best supper after midnight. To the American, as to Arthur
Pendennis or Barnes Newcome, the value of social position and
knowledge was evident enough; he valued it at rather more than it
was worth to him; but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary
with every street corner; a thing which had shifting standards,
and which no one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and
beauties of his time, with great names and of the utmost fashion,
made some of the poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.
Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every
announcement of a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a
formal dinner. The greatest social event gave not half the
pleasure that one could buy for ten shillings at the opera when
Patti sang Cherubino or Gretchen, and not a fourth of the
education. Yet this was not the opinion of the best judges.
Lothrop Motley, who stood among the very best, said to him early
in his apprenticeship that the London dinner and the English
country house were the perfection of human society. The young man
meditated over it, uncertain of its meaning. Motley could not
have thought the dinner itself perfect, since there was not then
-- outside of a few bankers or foreigners -- a good cook or a
good table in London, and nine out of ten of the dinners that
Motley ate came from Gunter's, and all were alike. Every one,
especially in young society, complained bitterly that Englishmen
did not know a good dinner when they ate it, and could not order
one if they were given carte blanche. Henry Adams was not a
judge, and knew no more than they, but he heard the complaints,
and he could not think that Motley meant to praise the English
cuisine.
Equally little could Motley have meant that dinners were good
to look at. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes; nothing
less artistic than the appearance of the company. One's eyes
might be dazzled by family diamonds, but, if an American woman
were present, she was sure to make comments about the way the
jewels were worn. If there was a well-dressed lady at table, she
was either an American or "fast." She attracted as much notice as
though she were on the stage. No one could possibly admire an
English dinner-table.
Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were
perfect. The manners of English society were notorious, and the
taste was worse. Without exception every American woman rose in
rebellion against English manners. In fact, the charm of London
which made most impression on Americans was the violence of its
contrasts; the extreme badness of the worst, making background
for the distinction, refinement, or wit of a few, just as the
extreme beauty of a few superb women was more effective against
the plainness of the crowd. The result was mediaeval, and
amusing; sometimes coarse to a degree that might have startled a
roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to a degree
that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic
contrast was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his
mind. He meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was
thinking of his own tastes.
Probably he meant that, in his favorite houses, the tone was
easy, the talk was good, and the standard of scholarship was
high. Even there he would have been forced to qualify his
adjectives. No German would have admitted that English
scholarship was high, or that it was scholarship at all, or that
any wish for scholarship existed in England. Nothing that seemed
to smell of the shop or of the lecture-room was wanted. One might
as well have talked of Renan's Christ at the table of the Bishop
of London, as talk of German philology at the table of an Oxford
don. Society, if a small literary class could be called society,
wanted to be amused in its old way. Sydney Smith, who had amused,
was dead; so was Macaulay, who instructed if he did not amuse;
Thackeray died at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never felt at home,
and seldom appeared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not sprightly;
Tennyson detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by them;
Darwin never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's
breakfasts: Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew
Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward;
or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A
relatively small class, commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost
at the usual London dinner, such society as this was fairly
familiar even to a private secretary, but to the literary
American it might well seem perfection since he could find
nothing of the sort in America. Within the narrow limits of this
class, the American Legation was fairly at home; possibly a score
of houses, all liberal, and all literary, but perfect only in the
eyes of a Harvard College historian. They could teach little
worth learning, for their tastes were antiquated and their
knowledge was ignorance to the next generation. What was
altogether fatal for future purposes, they were only English.
A social education in such a medium was bound to be useless in
any other, yet Adams had to learn it to the bottom. The one thing
needful for a private secretary, was that he should not only
seem, but should actually be, at home. He studied carefully, and
practised painfully, what seemed to be the favorite
accomplishments of society. Perhaps his nervousness deceived him;
perhaps he took for an ideal of others what was only his
reflected image; but he conceived that the perfection of human
society required that a man should enter a drawing-room where he
was a total stranger, and place himself on the hearth-rug, his
back to the fire, with an air of expectant benevolence, without
curiosity, much as though he had dropped in at a charity concert,
kindly disposed to applaud the performers and to overlook
mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded in youth, and towards
thirty it took a form of modified insolence and offensive
patronage; but about sixty it mellowed into courtesy, kindliness,
and even deference to the young which had extraordinary charm
both in women and in men. Unfortunately Adams could not wait till
sixty for education; he had his living to earn; and the English
air of patronage would earn no income for him anywhere else.
After five or six years of constant practice, any one can
acquire the habit of going from one strange company to another
without thinking much of one's self or of them, as though
silently reflecting that "in a world where we are all insects, no
insect is alien; perhaps they are human in parts"; but the dreamy
habit of mind which comes from solitude in crowds is not fitness
for social success except in London. Everywhere else it is
injury. England was a social kingdom whose social coinage had no
currency elsewhere.
Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give
nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become
very interesting -- very charming -- to the man of fifty. The
young American was not worth the young Englishwoman's notice, and
never received it. Neither understood the other. Only in the
domestic relation, in the country -- never in society at large --
a young American might accidentally make friends with an
Englishwoman of his own age, but it never happened to Henry
Adams. His susceptible nature was left to the mercy of American
girls, which was professional duty rather than education as long
as diplomacy held its own.
Thus he found himself launched on waters where he had never
meant to sail, and floating along a stream which carried him far
from his port. His third season in London society saw the end of
his diplomatic education, and began for him the social life of a
young man who felt at home in England -- more at home there than
anywhere else. With this feeling, the mere habit of going to
garden-parties, dinners, receptions, and balls had nothing to do.
One might go to scores without a sensation of home. One might
stay in no end of country houses without forgetting that one was
a total stranger and could never be anything else. One might bow
to half the dukes and duchesses in England, and feel only the
more strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod and never
come nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a personal
mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and one
separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another, and
so make, little by little, a group.
One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir
Henry Holland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted
with every American Minister since Edward Everett, and was a
valuable social ally, who had the courage to try to be of use to
everybody, and who, while asking the private secretary to
breakfast one day, was too discreet to betray what he might have
learned about rebel doings at his breakfast-table the day before.
He had been friendly with the Legation, in the teeth of society,
and was still bearing up against the weight of opinion, so that
young Adams could not decline his invitations, although they
obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nine o'clock in the
morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Holland was
himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed about
London, and eating Welsh rarebit every night before bed; he
thought that any young man should be pleased to take his early
muffin in Brook Street, and supply a few crumbs of war news for
the daily peckings of eminent patients. Meekly, when summoned,
the private secretary went, and on reaching the front door, this
particular morning, he found there another young man in the act
of rapping the knocker. They entered the breakfastroom together,
where they were introduced to each other, and Adams learned that
the other guest was a Cambridge undergraduate, Charles Milnes
Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the Member for Wenlock;
another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from Thornes near Wakefield.
Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire. By another chance it happened
that young Milnes Gaskell was intimate at Cambridge with William
Everett who was also about to take his degree. A third chance
inspired Mr. Evarts with a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led
William Everett to offer his services as host. Adams acted as
courier to Mr. Evarts, and at the end of May they went down for a
few days, when William Everett did the honors as host with a
kindness and attention that made his cousin sorely conscious of
his own social shortcomings. Cambridge was pretty, and the dons
were kind. Mr. Evarts enjoyed his visit but this was merely a
part of the private secretary's day's work. What affected his
whole life was the intimacy then begun with Milnes Gaskell and
his circle of undergraduate friends, just about to enter the
world.
Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand
people, great and small; jostled against every one, from royal
princes to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions
and private parties; visited every part of the United Kingdom and
was not quite a stranger at the Legations in Paris and Rome; he
knew the societies of certain country houses, and acquired habits
of Sunday-afternoon calls; but all this gave him nothing to do,
and was life wasted. For him nothing whatever could be gained by
escorting American ladies to drawing-rooms or American gentlemen
to levees at St. James's Palace, or bowing solemnly to people
with great titles, at Court balls, or even by awkwardly jostling
royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for the Government,
and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would ever
know enough of their business to thank him for doing what they
did not know how to get properly done by their own servants; but
for Henry Adams -- not private secretary -- all the time taken up
by such duties was wasted. On the other hand, his few personal
intimacies concerned him alone, and the chance that made him
almost a Yorkshireman was one that must have started under the
Heptarchy.
More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly
more distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strongest
of the British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a
different race from the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the mass
and the cultivation of the West Riding. London could never quite
absorb Yorkshire, which, in its turn had no great love for London
and freely showed it. To a certain degree, evident enough to
Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English -- or was all England, as
they might choose to express it. This must have been the reason
why young Adams was drawn there rather than elsewhere. Monckton
Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him, and possibly Milnes
was the only man in England with whom Henry Adams, at that
moment, had a chance of calling out such an un-English effort.
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any region south of the Humber
contained a considerable house where a young American would have
been sought as a friend. Eccentricity alone did not account for
it. Monckton Milnes was a singular type, but his distant cousin,
James Milnes Gaskell, was another, quite as marked, in an
opposite sense. Milnes never seemed willing to rest; Milnes
Gaskell never seemed willing to move. In his youth one of a very
famous group -- Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Manning, Gladstone,
Francis Doyle -- and regarded as one of the most promising; an
adorer of George Canning; in Parliament since coming of age;
married into the powerful connection of the Wynns of Wynstay;
rich according to Yorkshire standards; intimate with his
political leaders; he was one of the numerous Englishmen who
refuse office rather than make the effort of carrying it, and
want power only to make it a source of indolence. He was a
voracious reader and an admirable critic; he had forty years of
parliamentary tradition on his memory; he liked to talk and to
listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George Canning, his
dry champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he belonged to the
generation of 1830, a generation which could not survive the
telegraph and railway, and which even Yorkshire could hardly
produce again. To an American he was a character even more
unusual and more fascinating than his distant cousin Lord
Houghton.
Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his son
brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for she
thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than some
Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably right. The
American had the sense to see that she was herself one of the
most intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her sister,
Miss Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a
position in society that made their friendship a complirnent as
well as a pleasure. Their consent and approval settled the
matter. In England, the family is a serious fact; once admitted
to it, one is there for life. London might utterly vanish from
one's horizon, but as long as life lasted, Yorkshire lived for
its friends.
In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough
of Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate
that included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old,
plaything amused Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a
charming specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, had been
long left to decay as a farmhouse. She put it in order, and went
there to spend a part of the autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one
of her first guests, and drove about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin
with her, learning the loveliness of this exquisite country, and
its stores of curious antiquity. It was a new and charming
existence; an experience greatly to be envied -- ideal repose and
rural Shakespearian peace -- but a few years of it were likely to
complete his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part
in life as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of
Chaucer.
CHAPTER XIV
DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in
November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he
could safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties
of Earl Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few
months more his own term of four years would come to an end, and
even though the questions still under discussion with England
should somewhat prolong his stay, he might look forward with some
confidence to his return home in 1865. His son no longer fretted.
The time for going into the army had passed. If he were to be
useful at all, it must be as a son, and as a son he was treated
with the widest indulgence and trust. He knew that he was doing
himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life he had
done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh
birthday without having advanced a step, that he could see,
beyond his twenty-first. For the most part, his friends were
worse off than he. The war was about to end and they were to be
set adrift in a world they would find altogether strange.
At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation,
six months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The
London climate had told on some of the family; the physicians
prescribed a winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was
detached as their escort, since this was one of his professional
functions; and he passed six months, gaining an education as
Italian courier, while the Civil War came to its end. As far as
other education went, he got none, but he was amused. Travelling
in all possible luxury, at some one else's expense, with
diplomatic privileges and position, was a form of travel hitherto
untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in
winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples
near by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for
the education of every properly trained private secretary; the
journey north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream;
the Splugen Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing;
Paris had always something to show. The chances of accidental
education were not so great as they had been, since one's field
of experience had grown large; but perhaps a season at Baden
Baden in these later days of its brilliancy offered some chances
of instruction, if it were only the sight of fashionable Europe
and America on the race-course watching the Duke of Hamilton, in
the middle, improving his social advantages by the conversation
of Cora Pearl.
The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that
nursery of murderers and murdered, as though America were also
getting educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as
before. Nothing happened. The travellers changed no plan or
movement. The Minister did not recall them to London. The season
was over before they returned; and when the private secretary sat
down again at his desk in Portland Place before a mass of copy in
arrears, he saw before him a world so changed as to be beyond
connection with the past. His identity, if one could call a
bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain;
but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a
spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.
All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and
hastened to get married and retire into back streets and suburbs
until they could find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going
home "next fall," and when the fall came, he was going home "next
spring," and when the spring came, President Andrew Johnson was
at loggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things
unchanged. After the usual manner of public servants who had
acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the
members of the Legation in London continued the daily routine of
English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened to
become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the
young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack,
was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently
he must set to work; he must get a new education he must begin a
career of his own.
Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him;
for diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held,
during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a
position at the centre of action, with his hands actually
touching the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at
Vienna or Madrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the
next President should do him the honor to turn him out. For once
all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was not possible.
In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
in the State Department, but, between the President and the
Senate, service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of
career was more difficult than the education which had proved
impracticable. Adams saw no road; in fact there was none. All his
friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way that
he could have taken. John Hay passed through London in order to
bury himself in second-rate Legations for years, before he
drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and George Smalley on
the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried
Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed
in the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was
forced into State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with
brevet-brigadier rank, trying to find employment. Scores of
others tried experiments more or less unsuccessful. Henry Adams
could see easy ways of making a hundred blunders; he could see no
likely way of making a legitimate success. Such as it was, his
so-called education was wanted nowhere.
One profession alone seemed possible -- the press. In 1860 he
would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
thousand other young graduates from American colleges who entered
the world every year enjoying the same conviction; but in 1866
the situation was altered; the possession of money had become
doubly needful for success, and double energy was essential to
get money. America had more than doubled her scale. Yet the press
was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be
artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing
else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass
of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could
always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if
one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office.
The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a
cheap boarding-school but it was still the nearest approach to a
career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education. For the
press, then, Henry Adams decided to fit himself, and since he
could not go home to get practical training, he set to work to do
what he could in London.
He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain
number of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so
clearly. Do what he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere
of English methods and thoughts; he could breathe none other. His
mother -- who should have been a competent judge, since her
success and popularity in England exceeded that of her husband --
averred that every woman who lived a certain time in England came
to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how she
struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English tone of
mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hostile to
them than ever. As though to make him more helpless and wholly
distort his life, England grew more and more agreeable and
amusing. Minister Adams became, in 1866, almost a historical
monument in London; he held a position altogether his own. His
old opponents disappeared. Lord Palmerston died in October, 1865;
Lord Russell tottered on six months longer, but then vanished
from power; and in July, 1866, the conservatives came into
office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to deal with than
the Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret the change.
His personal relations were excellent and his personal weight
increased year by year. On that score the private secretary had
no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it
was enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all
he wanted, and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he
felt much at ease. Of his daily life he had only to reckon so
many breakfasts; so many dinners; so many receptions, balls,
theatres, and country-parties; so many cards to be left; so many
Americans to be escorted -- the usual routine of every young
American in a Legation; all counting for nothing in sum, because,
even if it had been his official duty -- which it was not -- it
was mere routine, a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led
to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave.
The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which
deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the London
drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and
fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go
together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a
whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about
innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate
tastes no one, except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to
doubt; least of all, the Englishman, for his tastes are his
being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee
drifts after his flowers, and, in England, every one must drift
with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the race-course or the
moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one or two
followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for
want of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a
certain taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted
that he had it not, because he could not see what his son thought
he saw in Turner. The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort
of aesthetic rag-bag of his own, which he regarded as amusement,
and never called art. So he would wander off on a Sunday to
attend service successively in all the city churches built by Sir
Christopher Wren; or he would disappear from the Legation day
after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his son
attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or
water-colors. Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's
tastes, but the only difference between them was a slight
difference of direction. The Minister's mind like his writings
showed a correctness of form and line that his son would have
been well pleased had he inherited.
Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most
alluring and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small
chance of escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no
beginning, middle, or end, no origin, no object, and no
conceivable result as education. In London one met no corrective.
The only American who came by, capable of teaching, was William
Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the Minister which now
completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt talked
constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous teacher, but
Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had
inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which
he was slow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish
of Adams's mind. The portrait finished, he went.
As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du
Bac, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the
Palais Royal, and talk of whatever interested the students of the
Beaux Arts. Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet
seized his style. Adams caught very little of what lay in his
mind, and the less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad
except the restaurants, while the continuous life in England made
French art seem worst of all. This did not prove that English
art, in 1866, was good; far from it; but it helped to make
bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of England.
Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden
of innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milnes
Gaskells had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few Americans will
ever ask whether any one has described the Palgraves, but the
family was one of the most describable in all England at that
day. Old Sir Francis, the father, had been much the greatest of
all the historians of early England, the only one who was
un-English; and the reason of his superiority lay in his name,
which was Cohen, and his mind which was Cohen also, or at least
not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in order to please
his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis Turner,
Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Francis
Turner -- or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave -- unable
to work off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled
in the atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic. His
art criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the
British artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "Golden
Treasury," helped Adams to more literary education than he ever
got from any taste of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one
of the minor poets; his hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was
too ferocious to be liked; even Holman Hunt found his temper
humorous; among many rivals, he may perhaps have had a right to
claim the much-disputed rank of being the most unpopular man in
London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for a docile pupil.
Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked to listen.
Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for Palgrave's
voice was strident, and nothing could stop him. Literature,
painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his
attacks, which were always intelligent if not always kind, and
when these failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John
Richard Green, who was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose
Irish charm of touch and humor defended him from most assaults,
used to tell with delight of Palgrave's call on him just after he
had moved into his new Queen Anne house in Kensington Square:
"Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was,
'I've counted three anachronisms on your front doorstep.' "
Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded
with emphasis. Woolner's sculpture showed none of the rough
assertion that Woolner himself showed, when he was not making
supernatural effort to be courteous, but his busts were
remarkable, and his work altogether was, in Palgrave's clamorous
opinion, the best of his day. He took the matter of British art
-- or want of art -- seriously, almost ferociously, as a personal
grievance and torture; at times he was rather terrifying in the
anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. as Henry Adams felt no
responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer
for sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like
Carlyle's, and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as
a third member of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford
Brooke whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose
expression was modified by clerical propriety. Among these men,
one wandered off into paths of education much too devious and
slippery for an American foot to follow. He would have done
better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned a career.
Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is
good, and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had
not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but
he was curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew.
He took Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or
Michael Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner;
but when he quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer
pooh-poohed it, and declared that it had no weight in the trade.
If he went to a sale of drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or
Christie's, an hour afterwards, he saw these same dealers
watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and bidding over them.
He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He once bought a
water-color from the artist himself out of his studio, and had it
doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he took
it for framing He was reduced to admit that he could not prove
its authenticity; internal evidence was against it.
One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the
Legation in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to
take Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings
was on show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be
that of Sir Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed
record of a century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably
none but collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some
dozens of these were always on hand, following every sale, and
especially on the lookout for old drawings, which became rarer
every year. Turning rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped at
one containing several small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt,
one as Rafael; and putting his finger on the Rafael, after
careful examination; "I should buy this," he said; "it looks to
me like one of those things that sell for five shillings one day,
and fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a bid, and the
next morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold slowly,
and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he came
back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed
at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted
the drawing for himself if he had not in a manner given it to
Adams, the culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked
the clerk for the name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the
art-dealer, near Covent Garden, whom he slightly knew. Going at
once to the shop he waited till young Holloway came in, with his
purchases under his arm, and without attempt at preface, he said:
"You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I wanted. Do you
mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out the parcel, looked
over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number for the
sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought possibly genuine; taking
that out, Adams might have the rest for the price he paid for the
lot -- twelve shillings.
Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably
seen these drawings. Two of them -- only two -- had thought them
worth buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the
Rafael, Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the
purchaser of the Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject,
but thought he might credit himself with education to the value
of twelve shillings, and call the drawing nothing. Such items of
education commonly came higher.
He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the
window, one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed
at the British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the
drawings, and, if you ask him, he will have it taken off the
mount." Adams amused himself for a day or two by searching
Rafael's works for the figure, which he found at last in the
Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it happened --
though Adams did not know it -- the British Museum owned a much
finer drawing. At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished
red-chalk sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room,
with some of the finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on
the walls. "Yes!" said Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but
it's not Rafael!" Adams, feeling himself incompetent to discuss
this subject, reported the result to Palgrave, who said that Reed
knew nothing about it. Also this point lay beyond Adams's
competence; but he noted that Reed was in the employ of the
British Museum as Curator of the best -- or nearly the best --
collection in the world, especially of Rafaels, and that he
bought for the Museum. As expert he had rejected both the Rafael
and the Rembrandt at first-sight, and after his attention was
recalled to the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected it
again.
A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr. Reed
took out of his drawer and gave him, saying with what seemed a
little doubt or hesitation: "I should tell you that the paper
shows a water-mark, which I kind the same as that of paper used
by Marc Antonio." A little taken back by this method of studying
art, a method which even a poor and ignorant American might use
as well as Rafael himself, Adams asked stupidly: "Then you think
it genuine?" "Possibly!" replied Reed; "but much overdrawn."
Here was expert opinion after a second revise, with help of
water-marks! In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve
shillings as education; but this was not all. Reed continued:
"The lines on the back seem to be writing, which I cannot read,
but if you will take it down to the manuscript-room, they will
read it for you."
Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts and
begged him to read the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes'
study, very obligingly said he could not: "It is scratched with
an artist's crayon, very rapidly, with many unusual abbreviations
and old forms. If any one in Europe can read it, it is the old
man at the table yonder, Libri! Take it to him!"
This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even judge
a manuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he had
nothing to pay, not even twelve shillings, though he thought
these experts worth more, at least for his education. Accordingly
he carried his paper to Libri, a total stranger to him, and asked
the old man, as deferentially as possible, to tell him whether
the lines had any meaning. Had Adams not been an ignorant person
he would have known all about Libri, but his ignorance was vast,
and perhaps was for the best. Libri looked at the paper, and then
looked again, and at last bade him sit down and wait. Half an
hour passed before he called Adams back and showed him these
lines:--
"Or questo credo ben che una elleria
Te offende tanto che te offese il core.
Perche sei grande nol sei in tua volia;
Tu vedi e gia non credi il tuo valore;
Passate gia son tutte gelosie;
Tu sei di sasso; non hai piu dolore."
As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's
reading, but he added that the abbreviations were many and
unusual; that the writing was very ancient; and that the word he
read as "elleria" in the first line was not Italian at all.
By this time, one had got too far beyond one's depth to ask
questions. If Libri could not read Italian, very clearly Adams
had better not offer to help him. He took the drawing, thanked
everybody, and having exhausted the experts of the British
Museum, took a cab to Woolner's studio, where he showed the
figure and repeated Reed's opinion. Woolner snorted: "Reed's a
fool!" he said; "he knows nothing about it; there maybe a rotten
line or two, but the drawing's all right."
For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece,
partly for its own interest, but largely for curiosity to see
whether any critic or artist would ever stop to look at it. None
ever did, unless he knew the story. Adams himself never wanted to
know more about it. He refused to seek further light. He never
cared to learn whether the drawing was Rafael's, or whether the
verse were Rafael's, or whether even the water-mark was Rafael's.
The experts -- some scores of them including the British Museum,
-- had affirmed that the drawing was worth a certain moiety of
twelve shillings. On that point, also, Adams could offer no
opinion, but he was clear that his education had profited by it
to that extent -- his amusement even more.
Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met
the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that
ought to direct him to the next station but never did. There was
no next station. All the art of a thousand -- or ten thousand --
years had brought England to stuff which Palgrave and Woolner
brayed in their mortars; derided, tore in tatters, growled at,
and howled at, and treated in terms beyond literary usage.
Whistler had not yet made his appearance in London, but the
others did quite as well. What result could a student reach from
it? Once, on returning to London, dining with Stopford Brooke,
some one asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy Exhibition
made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it was
rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than
death. Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part,
Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an
object to him as a searcher of knowledge -- neither would have
vogue in America -- neither would help him to a career. Both of
them led him away from his objects, into an English dilettante
museum of scraps, with nothing but a wall-paper to unite them in
any relation of sequence. Possibly English taste was one degree
more fatal than English scholarship, but even this question was
open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what he was
told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now a
water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because
it was more likely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them
not because they went together -- on the contrary, they made
rather awkward spots on the wall as they did on the mind -- but
because he could afford to buy those, and not others. Ten pounds
did not go far to buy a Michael Angelo, but was a great deal of
money to a private secretary. The effect was spotty, fragmentary,
feeble; and the more so because the British mind was constructed
in that way -- boasted of it, and held it to be true philosophy
as well as sound method.
What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as
wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew
it, but perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were
scrappy, and ought to be studied so. Turning from British art to
British literature, one met the same dangers. The historical
school was a playground of traps and pitfalls. Fatally one fell
into the sink of history -- antiquarianism. For one who nourished
a natural weakness for what was called history, the whole of
British literature in the nineteenth century was antiquarianism
or anecdotage, for no one except Buckle had tried to link it with
ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as having failed.
Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest
admiration for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even
distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One
might as well imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was
wrong here, for the poet and the historian ought to have
different methods, and Macaulay's method ought to be imitable if
it were sound; yet the method was more doubtful than the style.
He was a dramatist; a painter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the
English mind, method, genius, or whatever one might call it; but
one never could quite admit that the method which ended in Froude
and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion and poetry
were eccentricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met them
at dinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the
English method was right, and art fragmentary by essence.
History, like everything else, might be a field of scraps, like
the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little
natural reluctance to decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the
golden dust-heap of British refuse; but if one must, one could at
least expect a degree from Oxford and the respect of the
Athenaeum Club.
While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy
with his "History of New England." Of all the relics of
childhood, Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the
more so because he, too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows
of antiquarianism, and had forgotten the world in his pursuit of
the New England Puritan. Although America seemed becoming more
and more indifferent to the Puritan except as a slightly rococo
ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study for the
Monkbarns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as
his clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia
in the Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man,
or, what was much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and
the task of justification was onerous enough to require the
occasional relief of a contrast or scapegoat. When Dr. Palfrey
happened on the picturesque but unpuritanic figure of Captain
John Smith, he felt no call to beautify Smith's picture or to
defend his moral character; he became impartial and penetrating.
The famous story of Pocahontas roused his latent New England
scepticism. He suggested to Adams, who wanted to make a position
for himself, that an article in the North American Review on
Captain John Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract as
much attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other
stone that could be thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest
nothing better. The task seemed likely to be amusing. So he
planted himself in the British Museum and patiently worked over
all the material he could find, until, at last, after three or
four months of labor, he got it in shape and sent it to Charles
Norton, who was then editing the North American. Mr. Norton very
civilly and even kindly accepted it. The article appeared in
January, 1867.
Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in
education; something that tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite
of personal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil
wars and diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be
actual, daily, and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at
twenty-eight, still in English society, dragged on one side into
English dilettantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most
futile; and, on the other, into American antiquarianism, which of
all antiquarianism he held the most foolish. This was the result
of five years in London. Even then he knew it to be a false
start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to amount to
anything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with a
new purpose.
CHAPTER XV
DARWINISM (1867-1868)
POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet
for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in
Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are
exceedingly long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society.
The geological champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the
Lyells were intimate at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said
of Darwin, what Palgrave said of Tennyson, that the first time he
came to town, Adams should be asked to meet him, but neither of
them ever came to town, or ever cared to meet a young American,
and one could not go to them because they were known to dislike
intrusion. The only Americans who were not allowed to intrude
were the half-dozen in the Legation. Adams was content to read
Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his "Voyage of the
Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a predestined
follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow
Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in
those days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English
way, building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow
foundations as to shock the conservative, and delight the
frivolous. The atomic theory; the correlation and conservation of
energy; the mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory
of gases, and Darwin's Law of Natural Selection, were examples of
what a young man had to take on trust. Neither he nor any one
else knew enough to verify them; in his ignorance of mathematics,
he was particularly helpless; but this never stood in his way.
The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere -- to some great
generalization which would finish one's clamor to be educated.
That a beginner should understand them all, or believe them all,
no one could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist
because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded
belief, and one must know something in order to contradict even
such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.
By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow
trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and
he tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best
thing; he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He
was ready to become anything but quiet. As though the world had
not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset
more. He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by
trying to understand them.
He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of
geology; a science which suited idle minds as well as though it
were history. |
