The Education of Henry Adams
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