The Education of Henry Adams
no other reason than that it reminded him of the country, the summer,
and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way
inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The
reason was clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy had no
Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life
and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The
flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light his own
fires in the early morning was still on the mantelpiece of his study.
The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or of an evening
toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms, water-supplies, lighting,
heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts, were unknown at
Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom, a water-supply, a furnace, and
gas. The superiority of Boston was evident, but a child liked it no
better for that.
The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed the
mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The President's
place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more interesting
of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in fashion. It
showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked of colonial age,
but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he
never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish
breath. He never could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century
style. He was never able to adopt it, any more than his father or
grandfather or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was worse;
but because, for some remote reason, he was born an eighteenth-century
child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth century. What style it
had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis Seize chairs
and sofas. The panels belonged to an old colonial Vassall who built the
house; the furniture had been brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801
or 1817, along with porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic
remnants; and neither of the two eighteenth-century styles--neither
English Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize--was comfortable for a boy,
or for any one else. The dark mahogany had been painted white to suit
daily life in winter gloom. Nothing seemed to favor, for a child's
objects, the older forms. On the contrary, most boys, as well as
grown-up people, preferred the new, with good reason, and the child
felt himself distinctly at a disadvantage for the taste.
Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams grandfather.
Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both were kind to
children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth than to the
nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference between them except
that one was associated with winter and the other with summer; one with
Boston, the other with Quincy. Even with Medford, the association was
hardly easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken to pass a few days
with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became so
violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought back in
disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously homesick again.
The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even there
the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel universe
combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers
and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child,
every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From
cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction
through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity,
has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is
the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy;
but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the
colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has
the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has
always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like
a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own
family, in such a relation, was never easy.
All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his
first serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of
will, in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy, but
instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting, left
rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected from a
natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint. He could not
have been much more than six years old at the time--seven at the
utmost--and his mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with the
President during the summer. What became of the rest of the family he
quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door
one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going
to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage;
that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy
had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no
means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability
by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by
successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and
was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long
staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the
door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he
took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by
awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation
at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an
old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near
a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to
school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion
of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before
reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this
reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not
stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after
another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously
the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did
the President release his hand and depart.
The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights
of boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him
dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had this
effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind, the child
must have recognized that the President, though a tool of tyranny, had
done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence. He had shown no
temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, and had made no display of
force. Above all, he had held his tongue. During their long walk he had
said nothing; he had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the
duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown
no concern in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy's
existence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling
itself little about his grandson's iniquities, and much about the
iniquities of President Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age
feel the whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be
the vicarious victim of his own sins, and he gave his grandfather
credit for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt
instinctive respect. He admitted force as a form of right; he admitted
even temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would at
that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as
every one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any
Puritan land.
Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old President's
relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether his
older brothers and sisters were still more favored he failed to
remember, but he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity which,
when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shocked him, for it
must have sometimes tried the President's patience. He hung about the
library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers;
searched the old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew the
sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything in the
corners, and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where a row of
tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars which were
supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never did. The Madam bore
with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which her husband purloined for
these hatcheries; but she made protest when he carried off her best
cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that he might see
the roots grow, but which, she said, he commonly forgot like the
caterpillars.
At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless they have
been improved off the ground; but his was a restless mind, and although
he took his hobbies seriously and would have been annoyed had his
grandchild asked whether he was bored like an English duke, he probably
cared more for the processes than for the results, so that his grandson
was saddened by the sight and smell of peaches and pears, the best of
their kind, which he brought up from the garden to rot on his shelves
for seed. With the inherited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, the
little boy Henry conscientiously brought up to him in his study the
finest peaches he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect.
Naturally he ate more by way of compensation, but the act showed that
he bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it is even possible that he
may have felt a certain self-reproach for his temporary role of
schoolmaster--seeing that his own career did not offer proof of the
worldly advantages of docile obedience--for there still exists
somewhere a little volume of critically edited Nursery Rhymes with the
boy's name in full written in the President's trembling hand on the
fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible, given to each child at
birth, with the proper inscription in the President's hand on the
fly-leaf; while their grandfather Brooks supplied the silver mugs.
So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill," five
minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view eastward over
Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his twelfth year, the child
passed his summers there, and his pleasures of childhood mostly centred
in it. Of education he had as yet little to complain. Country schools
were not very serious. Nothing stuck to the mind except home
impressions, and the sharpest were those of kindred children; but as
influences that warped a mind, none compared with the mere effect of
the back of the President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays,
in line with that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years
younger, seemed to children about the same age. Before railways entered
the New England town, every parish church showed half-a-dozen of these