The Education of Henry Adams
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