The Education of Henry Adams
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 difficulty, 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