The Education of Henry Adams
different power and a different person. The first serious consciousness
of Nature's gesture--her attitude towards life--took form then as a
phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time, the
stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself
stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with
resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what
these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical
motion; and its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine became
evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion was the most
human; but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or
profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty
known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be
held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a
Person.
With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped
for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world; for the
fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the world, which he thought
real, mimic and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his personal
horror. He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years in finding it
out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake below and of the
Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the first time in
his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was--a chaos of
anarchic and purposeless forces--and he needed days of repose to see it
clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity
of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its
heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond
itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but man became
chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were wholly restored, the
illusions of Europe suddenly vanished, leaving a new world to learn.
On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one might
have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal with the
chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams; the Emperor
Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck: himself
hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-break of the war was
wholly lost on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand, who could not
throw it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only when he got up to
Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe. Providence set up
no affiches to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut
herself adrift, and floated off, on an unknown stream, towards a less
known ocean. Standing on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as
much as though one stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an
army corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the war,
as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of
decorative art. The French, like true artists, always regarded war as
one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it;
and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with
singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like
an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a supernumerary hired to
fill the scene. Every evening at the theatre the comedy was interrupted
by order, and one stood up by order, to join in singing the
Marseillaise to order. For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden
to sing the Marseillaise under any circumstances, but at last regiment
after regiment marched through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while
the bystanders cared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been
brought out of the Government stores, and distributed by grammes per
capita. One had seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into a war,
and had watched one's own regiments march to the front without sign of
enthusiasm; on the contrary, most serious, anxious, and conscious of
the whole weight of the crisis; but in Paris every one conspired to
ignore the crisis, which every one felt at hand. Here was education for
the million, but the lesson was intricate. Superficially Napoleon and
his Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers and
Gambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the
result. How could Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he
spoke of his Paris and its tastes, people would smile at his dotage?
As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining
monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII--three or four
young Englishmen--survived there, with Milnes Gaskell acting as Prior.
The August sun was warm; the calm of the Abbey was ten times secular;
not a discordant sound--hardly a sound of any sort except the cawing of
the ancient rookery at sunset--broke the stillness; and, after the
excitement of the last month, one felt a palpable haze of peace
brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of
Pteraspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying
on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, the monks studied the
war correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded in educating
himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.
While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen years
for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a Terebratula
would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which implied that the
new President of Harvard College wanted his help; but Adams knew
nothing about history, and much less about teaching, while he knew more
than enough about Harvard College; and wrote at once to thank President
Eliot, with much regret that the honor should be above his powers. His
mind was full of other matters. The summer, from which he had expected
only amusement and social relations with new people, had ended in the
most intimate personal tragedy, and the most terrific political
convulsion he had ever known or was likely to know. He had failed in
every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had refused his best essay.
He had made no acquaintances and hardly picked up the old ones. He
sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to begin again where he had
started two years before, but with no longer a hope of attaching
himself to a President or a party or a press. He was a free lance and
no other career stood in sight or mind. To that point education had
brought him.
Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment that it
had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and circulated
as a campaign document by the hundred thousand copies. He was
henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a Massachusetts
Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or return for this
partisan service consisted in being formally answered by Senator
Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document, presumed
to be also freely circulated, in which the Senator, besides refuting
his opinions, did him the honor--most unusual and picturesque in a
Senator's rhetoric--of likening him to a begonia.
The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial
qualities as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering. Far
from charming in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable for curious
and showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to have no useful
purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the most prominent
positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia in
Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful statesman,
and he thought about it still more when the Westminster Review for
October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy, which was also
instantly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth
driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to
be paid; but the honors of piracy resemble the colors of the begonia;
they are showy but not useful. Here was a tour de force he had never
dreamed himself equal to performing: two long, dry, quarterly, thirty
or forty page articles, appearing in quick succession, and pirated for
audiences running well into the hundred thousands; and not one person,
man or woman, offering him so much as a congratulation, except to call
him a begonia.
Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as
before, but the ways of America to a young person of literary and
political tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized man
had not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington what he
modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole family set on
him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861 his father
interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles argued and
urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles had views of
further joint operations in a new field. He said that Henry had done at
Washington all he could possibly do; that his position there wanted
solidity; that he was, after all, an adventurer; that a few years in
Cambridge would give him personal weight; that his chief function was
not to be that of teacher, but that of editing the North American
Review which was to be coupled with the professorship, and would lead
to the daily press. In short, that he needed the university more than
the university needed him.
Henry knew the university well enough to know that the
department of history was controlled by one of the most astute and
ideal administrators in the world--Professor Gurney--and that it was
Gurney who had established the new professorship, and had cast his net
over Adams to carry the double load of mediaeval history and the
Review. He could see no relation whatever between himself and a
professorship. He sought education; he did not sell it. He knew no
history; he knew only a few historians; his ignorance was mischievous
because it was literary, accidental, indifferent. On the other hand he
knew Gurney, and felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot take
one's self quite seriously in such matters; it could not much affect
the sum of solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in
Washington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good people who
thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide. One could not
reject their advice; still less disregard their wishes.
The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and
had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him almost as
American as the talk about diplomacy with his father ten years before.
"But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know nothing about Mediaeval
History." With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the
next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, "If
you will point out to me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will
appoint him." The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams
could not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not say
that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all
seemed to him unnecessary.