The Education of Henry Adams
nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly
such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy
to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one.
Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became
absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendors of Hugo and
Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in
personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the
Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he
had made on Hugo: "I was shown into a large room," he said, "with women
and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end
throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and
uttered the words: 'Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!' Silence followed.
Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: 'Chose sublime! un
Dieu qui croit en Dieu!"'
With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the
actors had not the instinct of the drama; and yet even a private
secretary was not wholly wanting in instinct. As soon as he reached
town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of "Queen Rosamund," and at
that time, if Swinburne was not joking, Pickering had sold seven
copies. When the "Poems and Ballads" came out, and met their great
success and scandal, he sought one of the first copies from Moxon. If
he had sinned and doubted at all, he wholly repented and did penance
before "Atalanta in Calydon," and would have offered Swinburne a solemn
worship as Milnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the
poet. Unfortunately it was worthless.
The three young men returned to London, and each went his own
way. Adams's interest in making friends was something desperate, but
"the London season," Milnes used to say, "is a season for making
acquaintances and losing friends"; there was no intimate life. Of
Swinburne he saw no more till Monckton Milnes summoned his whole array
of Frystonians to support him in presiding at the dinner of the
Authors' Fund, when Adams found himself seated next to Swinburne,
famous then, but no nearer. They never met again. Oliphant he met
oftener; all the world knew and loved him; but he too disappeared in
the way that all the world knows. Stirling of Keir, after one or two
efforts, passed also from Adams's vision into Sir William
Stirling-Maxwell. The only record of his wonderful visit to Fryston may
perhaps exist still in the registers of the St. James's Club, for
immediately afterwards Milnes proposed Henry Adams for membership, and
unless his memory erred, the nomination was seconded by Tricoupi and
endorsed by Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was a little
singular for variety, but on the whole it suggested that the private
secretary was getting on.
CHAPTER X
POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquired
whether Minister Adams would like the place of Assistant Secretary for
his son. It was the first--and last--office ever offered him, if indeed
he could claim what was offered in fact to his father. To them both,
the change seemed useless. Any young man could make some sort of
Assistant Secretary; only one, just at that moment, could make an
Assistant Son. More than half his duties were domestic; they sometimes
required long absences; they always required independence of the
Government service. His position was abnormal. The British Government
by courtesy allowed the son to go to Court as Attache, though he was
never attached, and after five or six years' toleration, the decision
was declared irregular. In the Legation, as private secretary, he was
liable to do Secretary's work. In society, when official, he was
attached to the Minister; when unofficial, he was a young man without
any position at all. As the years went on, he began to find advantages
in having no position at all except that of young man. Gradually he
aspired to become a gentleman; just a member of society like the rest.
The position was irregular; at that time many positions were irregular;
yet it lent itself to a sort of irregular education that seemed to be
the only sort of education the young man was ever to get.
Such as it was, few young men had more. The spring and summer
of 1863 saw a great change in Secretary Seward's management of foreign
affairs. Under the stimulus of danger, he too got education. He felt,
at last, that his official representatives abroad needed support.
Officially he could give them nothing but despatches, which were of no
great value to any one; and at best the mere weight of an office had
little to do with the public. Governments were made to deal with
Governments, not with private individuals or with the opinions of
foreign society. In order to affect European opinion, the weight of
American opinion had to be brought to bear personally, and had to be
backed by the weight of American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously
to work and sent over every important American on whom he could lay his
hands. All came to the Legation more or less intimately, and Henry
Adams had a chance to see them all, bankers or bishops, who did their
work quietly and well, though, to the outsider, the work seemed wasted
and the "influential classes" more indurated with prejudice than ever.
The waste was only apparent; the work all told in the end, and
meanwhile it helped education.
Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the
Minister and to cooperate with him. The most interesting of these was
Thurlow Weed, who came to do what the private secretary himself had
attempted two years before, with boyish ignorance of his own powers.
Mr. Weed took charge of the press, and began, to the amused
astonishment of the secretaries, by making what the Legation had
learned to accept as the invariable mistake of every amateur diplomat;
he wrote letters to the London Times. Mistake or not, Mr. Weed soon got
into his hands the threads of management, and did quietly and smoothly
all that was to be done. With his work the private secretary had no
connection; it was he that interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete
American education in himself. His mind was naturally strong and
beautifully balanced; his temper never seemed ruffled; his manners were
carefully perfect in the style of benevolent simplicity, the tradition
of Benjamin Franklin. He was the model of political management and
patient address; but the trait that excited enthusiasm in a private
secretary was his faculty of irresistibly conquering confidence. Of all
flowers in the garden of education, confidence was becoming the rarest;
but before Mr. Weed went away, young Adams followed him about not only
obediently--for obedience had long since become a blind instinct--but
rather with sympathy and affection, much like a little dog.
The sympathy was not due only to Mr. Weed's skill of
management, although Adams never met another such master, or any one
who approached him; nor was the confidence due to any display of
professions, either moral or social, by Mr. Weed. The trait that
astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparent unselfishness.
Never, in any man who wielded such power, did Adams meet anything like
it. The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of
self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies; a
diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one
can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of
egotism it stimulates; and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a
rare immune. He thought apparently not of himself, but of the person he
was talking with. He held himself naturally in the background. He was
not jealous. He grasped power, but not office. He distributed offices
by handfuls without caring to take them. He had the instinct of empire:
he gave, but he did not receive. This rare superiority to the
politicians he controlled, a trait that private secretaries never met
in the politicians themselves, excited Adams's wonder and curiosity,
but when he tried to get behind it, and to educate himself from the
stores of Mr. Weed's experience, he found the study still more
fascinating. Management was an instinct with Mr. Weed; an object to be
pursued for its own sake, as one plays cards; but he appeared to play
with men as though they were only cards; he seemed incapable of feeling
himself one of them. He took them and played them for their face-value;
but once, when he had told, with his usual humor, some stories of his
political experience which were strong even for the Albany lobby, the
private secretary made bold to ask him outright: "Then, Mr. Weed, do
you think that no politician can be trusted?" Mr. Weed hesitated for a
moment; then said in his mild manner: "I never advise a young man to
begin by thinking so."
This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral
sense, as though Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions!" As he grew
older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it as a question of how
the game should be played. Young men most needed experience. They could
not play well if they trusted to a general rule. Every card had a
relative value. Principles had better be left aside; values were
enough. Adams knew that he could never learn to play politics in so
masterly a fashion as this: his education and his nervous system
equally forbade it, although he admired all the more the impersonal
faculty of the political master who could thus efface himself and his
temper in the game. He noticed that most of the greatest politicians in
history had seemed to regard men as counters. The lesson was the more
interesting because another famous New Yorker came over at the same
time who liked to discuss the same problem. Secretary Seward sent
William M. Evarts to London as law counsel, and Henry began an
acquaintance with Mr. Evarts that soon became intimate. Evarts was as
individual as Weed was impersonal; like most men, he cared little for
the game, or how it was played, and much for the stakes, but he played
it in a large and liberal way, like Daniel Webster, "a great advocate
employed in politics." Evarts was also an economist of morals, but with
him the question was rather how much morality one could afford. "The
world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill
it." One sought education in order to adjust the dose.
The teachings of Weed and Evarts were practical, and the
private secretary's life turned on their value. England's power of
absorbing truth was small. Englishmen, such as Palmerston, Russell,
Bethell, and the society represented by the Times and Morning Post, as
well as the Tories represented by Disraeli, Lord Robert Cecil, and the
Standard, offered a study in education that sickened a young student
with anxiety. He had begun--contrary to Mr. Weed's advice--by taking
their bad faith for granted. Was he wrong? To settle this point became
the main object of the diplomatic education so laboriously pursued, at
a cost already stupendous, and promising to become ruinous. Life
changed front, according as one thought one's self dealing with honest
men or with rogues.
Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of
dishonesty. The reasons that satisfied him had not altogether satisfied
his father, and of course his father's doubts gravely shook his own
convictions, but, in practice, if only for safety, the Legation put
little or no confidence in Ministers, and there the private secretary's
diplomatic education began. The recognition of belligerency, the
management of the Declaration of Paris, the Trent Affair, all
strengthened the belief that Lord Russell had started in May, 1861,
with the assumption that the Confederacy was established; every step he