The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously enough, he
failed here also. From the European or English point of view, he had no
social experience, and never got it. Minister Adams happened on a
political interregnum owing to Lord Palmerston's personal influence
from 1860 to 1865; but this political interregnum was less marked than
the social still-stand during the same years. The Prince Consort was
dead; the Queen had retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In
its best days, Victorian society had never been "smart." During the
forties, under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be
simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste of
Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen
Victoria. Style lingered in the background with the powdered footman
behind the yellow chariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style
save what she inherited. Balmoral was a startling revelation of royal
taste. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court unless it
were the way they were worn. One's eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but
they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared well dressed, she was
either a foreigner or "fast." Fashion was not fashionable in London
until the Americans and the Jews were let loose. The style of London
toilette universal in 1864 was grotesque, like Monckton Milnes on
horseback in Rotten Row.
Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the society
of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other causes, young Adams
never got the full training of such style as still existed. The
embarrassments of his first few seasons socially ruined him. His own
want of experience prevented his asking introductions to the ladies who
ruled society; his want of friends prevented his knowing who these
ladies were; and he had every reason to expect snubbing if he put
himself in evidence. This sensitiveness was thrown away on English
society, where men and women treated each others' advances much more
brutally than those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private
secretary too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman. He
was not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old ones, felt
awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not
precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.
If there was in those days a country house in England which had
a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right to
consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady Margaret
Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting by her side--not
for his own merits--Henry Adams heard her say to herself in her languid
and liberal way, with her rich voice and musing manner, looking into
her tea-cup: "I don't think I care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken,
not so much on his own account as on hers, the young man could only
execute himself as gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make
one small exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident,
that she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew that,
except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in fact a
foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she should like him,
or any other foreigner, unless it were because she was bored by
natives. She seemed to feel that her indifference needed a reason to
excuse itself in her own eyes, and she showed the subconscious sympathy
of the Irish nature which never feels itself perfectly at home even in
England. She, too, was some shadowy shade un-English.
Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the
private secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till he
found his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt himself in
society, and he never knew definitely what was meant as society by
those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a score of societies
which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartest was the
smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest was the
sporting world, also unknown to him except through the talk of his
acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of nebulous
societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented legal circles
where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes of the bench and
bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge except when his father
took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old Lord
Campbell, both abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church and the Bishops
formed several societies which no secretary ever saw except as an
interloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical and
surgical professions; City people; artists; county families; the
Scotch, and indefinite other subdivisions of society existed, which
were as strange to each other as they were to Adams. At the end of
eight or ten seasons in London society he professed to know less about
it, or how to enter it, than he did when he made his first appearance
at Miss Burdett Coutts's in May, 1861.
Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him. An
American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished nor
gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to think of society at
large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred were useless to him, a
greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the question of getting
into--or getting out of--society which troubled young foreigners
greatly, settled itself after three or four years of painful
speculation. Society had no unity; one wandered about in it like a
maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of,
at dinner-time.
Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the accounts of
his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or George Smalley, and of
various ladies who reigned in the seventies, he inclined to think that
he knew very little about it. Certain great houses and certain great
functions of course he attended, like every one else who could get
cards, but even of these the number was small that kept an interest or
helped education. In seven years he could remember only two that seemed
to have any meaning for him, and he never knew what that meaning was.
Neither of the two was official; neither was English in interest; and
both were scandals to the philosopher while they scarcely enlightened
men of the world.
One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire House if
asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the usual people.
The private secretary was standing among the rest, when Mme. de
Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the Second Empire. How
beautiful she may have been, or indeed what sort of beauty she was,
Adams never knew, because the company, consisting of the most refined
and aristocratic society in the world, instantly formed a lane, and
stood in ranks to stare at her, while those behind mounted on chairs to
look over their neighbors' heads; so that the lady walked through this
polite mob, stared completely out of countenance, and fled the house at
once. This was all!
The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's pictures
of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his gray capote over
his red shirt, received all London, and three duchesses literally
worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events, a private secretary had
surely caught the last and highest touch of social experience; but what
it meant--what social, moral, or mental development it pointed out to
the searcher of truth--was not a matter to be treated fully by a leader
in the Morning Post or even by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de
Castiglione and Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for
simple measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an ordered
social system tending to orderly development--in London or
elsewhere--was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or Victor Hugo, but
was beyond any process yet reached by the education of Henry Adams, who
would probably, even then, have rejected, as superficial or
supernatural, all the views taken by any of the company who looked on
with him at these two interesting and perplexing sights.
From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his road
through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to think in
these years, 1860-65, that the nicest distinction between the very best
society and the second-best, was their attitude towards royalty. The
one regarded royalty as a bore, and avoided it, or quietly said that
the Queen had never been in society. The same thing might have been
said of fully half the peerage. Adams never knew even the names of half
the rest; he never exchanged ten words with any member of the royal
family; he never knew any one in those years who showed interest in any
member of the royal family, or who would have given five shillings for
the opinion of any royal person on any subject; or cared to enter any
royal or noble presence, unless the house was made attractive by as
much social effort as would have been necessary in other countries
where no rank existed. No doubt, as one of a swarm, young Adams
slightly knew various gilded youth who frequented balls and led such
dancing as was most in vogue, but they seemed to set no value on rank;
their anxiety was only to know where to find the best partners before
midnight, and the best supper after midnight. To the American, as to
Arthur Pendennis or Barnes Newcome, the value of social position and
knowledge was evident enough; he valued it at rather more than it was
worth to him; but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary with
every street corner; a thing which had shifting standards, and which no
one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and beauties of his
time, with great names and of the utmost fashion, made some of the
poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.
Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every announcement of
a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a formal dinner. The
greatest social event gave not half the pleasure that one could buy for
ten shillings at the opera when Patti sang Cherubino or Gretchen, and
not a fourth of the education. Yet this was not the opinion of the best
judges. Lothrop Motley, who stood among the very best, said to him
early in his apprenticeship that the London dinner and the English
country house were the perfection of human society. The young man
meditated over it, uncertain of its meaning. Motley could not have
thought the dinner itself perfect, since there was not then--outside of
a few bankers or foreigners--a good cook or a good table in London, and
nine out of ten of the dinners that Motley ate came from Gunter's, and
all were alike. Every one, especially in young society, complained
bitterly that Englishmen did not know a good dinner when they ate it,
and could not order one if they were given carte blanche. Henry Adams
was not a judge, and knew no more than they, but he heard the
complaints, and he could not think that Motley meant to praise the
English cuisine.