The Education of Henry Adams
adorer of George Canning; in Parliament since coming of age; married
into the powerful connection of the Wynns of Wynstay; rich according to
Yorkshire standards; intimate with his political leaders; he was one of
the numerous Englishmen who refuse office rather than make the effort
of carrying it, and want power only to make it a source of indolence.
He was a voracious reader and an admirable critic; he had forty years
of parliamentary tradition on his memory; he liked to talk and to
listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George Canning, his dry
champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he belonged to the generation
of 1830, a generation which could not survive the telegraph and
railway, and which even Yorkshire could hardly produce again. To an
American he was a character even more unusual and more fascinating than
his distant cousin Lord Houghton.
Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his son
brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for she
thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than some
Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably right. The
American had the sense to see that she was herself one of the most
intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her sister, Miss
Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a position in
society that made their friendship a compliment as well as a pleasure.
Their consent and approval settled the matter. In England, the family
is a serious fact; once admitted to it, one is there for life. London
might utterly vanish from one's horizon, but as long as life lasted,
Yorkshire lived for its friends.
In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough of
Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate that
included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old, plaything amused
Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a charming specimen of
fifteenth-century architecture, had been long left to decay as a
farmhouse. She put it in order, and went there to spend a part of the
autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one of her first guests, and drove
about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin with her, learning the loveliness of
this exquisite country, and its stores of curious antiquity. It was a
new and charming existence; an experience greatly to be envied--ideal
repose and rural Shakespearian peace--but a few years of it were likely
to complete his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part in
life as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer.
CHAPTER XIV
DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in
November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he could
safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties of Earl
Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few months more his
own term of four years would come to an end, and even though the
questions still under discussion with England should somewhat prolong
his stay, he might look forward with some confidence to his return home
in 1865. His son no longer fretted. The time for going into the army
had passed. If he were to be useful at all, it must be as a son, and as
a son he was treated with the widest indulgence and trust. He knew that
he was doing himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life
he had done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh
birthday without having advanced a step, that he could see, beyond his
twenty-first. For the most part, his friends were worse off than he.
The war was about to end and they were to be set adrift in a world they
would find altogether strange.
At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation,
six months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The London
climate had told on some of the family; the physicians prescribed a
winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was detached as their
escort, since this was one of his professional functions; and he passed
six months, gaining an education as Italian courier, while the Civil
War came to its end. As far as other education went, he got none, but
he was amused. Travelling in all possible luxury, at some one else's
expense, with diplomatic privileges and position, was a form of travel
hitherto untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in
winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples near
by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the
education of every properly trained private secretary; the journey
north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream; the Splugen
Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing; Paris had always
something to show. The chances of accidental education were not so
great as they had been, since one's field of experience had grown
large; but perhaps a season at Baden Baden in these later days of its
brilliancy offered some chances of instruction, if it were only the
sight of fashionable Europe and America on the race-course watching the
Duke of Hamilton, in the middle, improving his social advantages by the
conversation of Cora Pearl.
The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that nursery
of murderers and murdered, as though America were also getting
educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the Santa Maria in
Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as before. Nothing
happened. The travellers changed no plan or movement. The Minister did
not recall them to London. The season was over before they returned;
and when the private secretary sat down again at his desk in Portland
Place before a mass of copy in arrears, he saw before him a world so
changed as to be beyond connection with the past. His identity, if one
could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to
remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was
a spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.
All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and hastened to
get married and retire into back streets and suburbs until they could
find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going home "next fall," and
when the fall came, he was going home "next spring," and when the
spring came, President Andrew Johnson was at loggerheads with the
Senate, and found it best to keep things unchanged. After the usual
manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office and lost
the faculty of will, the members of the Legation in London continued
the daily routine of English society, which, after becoming a habit,
threatened to become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with
the young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack, was not
a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently he must set to
work; he must get a new education; he must begin a career of his own.
Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him; for
diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held, during the
four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a position at the
centre of action, with his hands actually touching the lever of power,
could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna or Madrid in order to bore
himself doing nothing until the next President should do him the honor
to turn him out. For once all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was
not possible.
In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
in the State Department, but, between the President and the Senate,
service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of career was more
difficult than the education which had proved impracticable. Adams saw
no road; in fact there was none. All his friends were trying one path
or another, but none went a way that he could have taken. John Hay
passed through London in order to bury himself in second-rate Legations
for years, before he drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and
George Smalley on the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried
Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed in
the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was forced into
State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with brevet-brigadier rank,
trying to find employment. Scores of others tried experiments more or
less unsuccessful. Henry Adams could see easy ways of making a hundred
blunders; he could see no likely way of making a legitimate success.
Such as it was, his so-called education was wanted nowhere.
One profession alone seemed possible--the press. In 1860 he
would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
thousand other young graduates from American colleges who entered the
world every year enjoying the same conviction; but in 1866 the
situation was altered; the possession of money had become doubly
needful for success, and double energy was essential to get money.
America had more than doubled her scale. Yet the press was still the
last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would
not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an
editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation
accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a
helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in
the corner of a newspaper office. The press was an inferior pulpit; an
anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school but it was still the
nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked
education. For the press, then, Henry Adams decided to fit himself, and
since he could not go home to get practical training, he set to work to
do what he could in London.
He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain number
of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so clearly. Do what
he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere of English methods and
thoughts; he could breathe none other. His mother--who should have been
a competent judge, since her success and popularity in England exceeded
that of her husband--averred that every woman who lived a certain time
in England came to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how
she struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English tone of
mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hostile to them
than ever. As though to make him more helpless and wholly distort his
life, England grew more and more agreeable and amusing. Minister Adams
became, in 1866, almost a historical monument in London; he held a
position altogether his own. His old opponents disappeared. Lord
Palmerston died in October, 1865; Lord Russell tottered on six months
longer, but then vanished from power; and in July, 1866, the
conservatives came into office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to
deal with than the Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret
the change. His personal relations were excellent and his personal
weight increased year by year. On that score the private secretary had
no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it was
enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all he wanted,
and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he felt much at ease.
Of his daily life he had only to reckon so many breakfasts; so many
dinners; so many receptions, balls, theatres, and country-parties; so
many cards to be left; so many Americans to be escorted--the usual