The Education of Henry Adams
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