The Education of Henry Adams
attempt he had made to direct his own education, and he was sure of
getting some education out of it; not perhaps anything that he
expected, but at least a path.
Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was open
to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every stage of his
coming life, and he would probably have done worse. The preliminary
step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had brought back from Germany
the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of
allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked
the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal,
for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older
men ought to flatter and please the young even when they altogether
exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As
practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith
rather than towards Boston where he properly belonged; for Concord, in
the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure light. Adams approached it in
much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic Cathedral, for
he well knew that the priests regarded him as only a worm. To the
Concord Church all Adamses were minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of
feeling, poetry or imagination; little higher than the common scourings
of State Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow
scope; and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel
uncertainty about so many matters more important than Adamses that his
mind rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready
to admit his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The
influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He was
slipping away from fixed principles; from Mount Vernon Street; from
Quincy; from the eighteenth century; and his first steps led toward
Concord.
He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the
rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an
insect, or something much lower--a man. It was surely no fault of his
that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps--as Mr. Emerson justly
said--it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime,
he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was
unreal, it was himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not
the banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did
not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to him, at one
time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowell was as little
transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy got no revolutionary
thought whatever--objective or subjective as they used to call it--but
he got good-humored encouragement to do what amused him, which
consisted in passing two years in Europe after finishing the four years
of Cambridge.
The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College
influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could trace, but he
tended towards negation on his own account, as one side of the New
England mind had always done, and even there he could never feel sure
that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In his opinion
the education was not serious, but in truth hardly any Boston student
took it seriously, and none of them seemed sure that President Walker
himself, or President Felton after him, took it more seriously than the
students. For them all, the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly
called social, rather than mental.
Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more, but
he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his social
position would never be questioned. What he needed was a career in
which social position had value. Never in his life would he have to
explain who he was; never would he have need of acquaintance to
strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly some one to show
him how to use the acquaintance he cared to make. He made no
acquaintance in college which proved to have the smallest use in after
life. All his Boston friends he knew before, or would have known in any
case, and contact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the last education
these young men needed. Cordial and intimate as their college relations
were, they all flew off in different directions the moment they took
their degrees. Harvard College remained a tie, indeed, but a tie little
stronger than Beacon Street and not so strong as State Street.
Strangers might perhaps gain something from the college if they were
hard pressed for social connections. A student like H. H. Richardson,
who came from far away New Orleans, and had his career before him to
chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friendships at college.
Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in after life
so much as Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation
had little to do with the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley,
and the roads run close together. Adams would have attached himself to
Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John LaFarge or
Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were at
Harvard College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with
years, and certain men with common tastes were bound to come together.
Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more equal footing
with them had he been less ignorant, and had he not thrown away ten
years of early life in acquiring what he might have acquired in one.
Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative
and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could
not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the vices were
less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking--though the mere
recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity, so fantastic it
seemed in later life--may have done no great or permanent harm; but the
habit of looking at life as a social relation--an affair of
society--did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no
cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the
manners and instincts of any profession--such as temper, patience,
courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
opponents--it would have been education better worth having than
mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it
helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. The
Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he stuck
only to what the college gave him. If parents went on generation after
generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of
its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite
as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.
Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if
it had little practical value or personal influence on the mass of
students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who liked it.
The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European, nor even wholly
Yankee; his admirers were few, and critics his many; perhaps his worst
weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness; but his ambitions,
social or intellectual, were necessarily cheap even though they might
be negative. Afraid of such serious risks, and still more afraid of
personal ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly
always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware
that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position
beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single
ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of
the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian
supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.
The College Magazine printed his work, and the College
Societies listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were
not; the audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was all the
encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to receive;
grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible future
acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one cared enough to
criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his
own limits. He found that he could not be this--or that--or the other;
always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or
force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he
believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him thin,
commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that
he could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it,
and he found that he had very little to say at best. Much that he then
wrote must be still in existence in print or manuscript, though he
never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it was in
reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling for
form; an instinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked--not even its weakness.
Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition--creates it--and
at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost took
place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being chosen as
the representative of his class--Class Orator--at the close of their
course. This was political as well as literary success, and precisely
the sort of eighteenth-century combination that fascinated an
eighteenth century boy. The idea lurked in his mind, at first as a
dream, in no way serious or even possible, for he stood outside the
number of what were known as popular men. Year by year, his position
seemed to improve, or perhaps his rivals disappeared, until at last, to
his own great astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of
the college permitted no active candidacy; he and his rivals had not a
word to say for or against themselves, and he was never even consulted
on the subject; he was not present at any of the proceedings, and how
it happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen, that one
evening on returning from Boston he received notice of his election,
after a very close contest, as Class Orator over the head of the first
scholar, who was undoubtedly a better orator and a more popular man. In
politics the success of the poorer candidate is common enough, and
Henry Adams was a fairly trained politician, but he never understood
how he managed to defeat not only a more capable but a more popular
rival.
To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-modesty;
his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvass, and he
knew his rivals and their following as well as he knew himself. What he
did not know, even after four years of education, was Harvard College.
What he could never measure was the bewildering impersonality of the
men, who, at twenty years old, seemed to set no value either on
official or personal standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men
who had lived together intimately during four of the most
impressionable years of life, and who, not only once but again and
again, in different ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately,
chose as their representatives precisely those of their companions who
seemed least to represent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals
had any position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of