The Education of Henry Adams
blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.
All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew Congressmen
by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote for his various
organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He enjoyed the life
enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much
happier than his friends Fish or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or
Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to
the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what
Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms
more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree.
They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by
remarking what a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest
possible distance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of
forest foliage. At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of
St. Peter's and the steps of Ara Coeli.
Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to
London for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy,"
which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review. It
was the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for
publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of
revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well as among some who were
not so respectable; and the attack on Erie was beginning to promise
success. London was a sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it
was thought well to strike them there, where they were socially and
financially exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
expression about America in an English review attracted ten times the
attention in America that the same article would attract in the North
American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in
full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest
ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any
case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase he was
becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.
CHAPTER XIX
CHAOS (1870)
ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's
Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine years had
passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861. Outwardly London was
the same. Outwardly Europe showed no great change. Palmerston and
Russell were forgotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much
alive. One's friends were more than ever prominent. John Bright was in
the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about to enter it; reform ran riot.
Never had the sun of progress shone so fair. Evolution from lower to
higher raged like an epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of prophets in
the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown the Irish
Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass an
Education Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping and
bounding over every country road. Even America, with her Erie scandals
and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.
At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no one
cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The smart set had
come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had frequented, from 1861
to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870. Death had ravaged one's circle
of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were
both dead, and Mr. James Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament.
That field of education seemed closed too.
One found one's self in a singular frame of mind--more
eighteenth-century than ever--almost rococo--and unable to catch
anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate.
London taught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading
to another--that the older men were more amusing than the younger--that
Lord Houghton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill--that there
were fewer men one wanted to meet--these, and a hundred more such
remarks, helped little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity.
For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him
a guaranty against all education he had use for. He resented change. He
would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle
as historical monuments. He did not care to Americanize Europe. The
Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if
preserved; and so was a Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was
the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came
back to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or
reform. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.
Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have
cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in
partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker. Common-sense
dictated it; but Adams and his friends were unfashionable by some law
of Anglo-Saxon custom--some innate atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as
already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no
idea of making a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw
nothing ahead of him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk
with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the
Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him and his
father long before they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to
make notes for his next year's articles; but he had not a thought that,
within three months, his world was to be upset, and he under it. Frank
Palgrave came one day, more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical
than ever, because Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with
Germany. Palgrave said that "Germany would beat France into scraps" if
there was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave
was always extreme; his language was incautious--violent!
In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education.
Things began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of
familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight the
coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Oxford
Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as it did to
the returned American. The country never smiled its velvet smile of
trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as to be asked
on a country visit. He loved it all--everything--had always loved it!
He felt almost attached to the Royal Exchange. He thought he owned the
St. James's Club. He patronized the Legation.
The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams had
become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies, and that
his writing would be printed of course; but he was stunned by the
reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen libel suits
on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as great in England
as in America, but one was hardly prepared to find it controlling the
Quarterlies. The English press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the
Erie scandal, as it had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal
of slavery, but when invited to support those who were trying to abate
these scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North American
Review were running greater risks every day, and no one thought of
fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an official document,
should scare the Edinburgh Review into silence for fear of Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's experience of English eccentricity,
though it was large.
He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to
the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The
literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest
that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and
willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he
had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and
the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, when an ally
was needed, the American was driven into the arms of the radicals.
Respectability, everywhere and always, turned its back the moment one
asked to do it a favor. Called suddenly away from England, he
despatched the article, at the last moment, to the Westminster Review
and heard no more about it for nearly six months.
He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram
from his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his
sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he had better
come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni di Lucca on the
second day. Tetanus had already set in.
The last lesson--the sum and term of education--began then.
He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without
having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen
Nature--only her surface--the sugar-coating that she shows to youth.
Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the
terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition
made it more than the will could struggle with; more than he could call
on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and
brilliant in the terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun
of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that
had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the
mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died
in convulsion.
One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen
a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion
and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror.
Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being
mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to
him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played
with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and
smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning.
The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the
picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy
of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer,
the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of
Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence,
as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.
Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels
them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought of a