The Education of Henry Adams
the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by
heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He
knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman,
which is saying much. Incidentally he knew more practical geology than
was good for him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than
the text-books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the
beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right; the
charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great deal more.
His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the
current of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought
or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him almost alone
among Americans. He had in him something of the Greek--a touch of
Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world.
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar.
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their
generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his
career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle--the same
stock of implements--the same field to work in; above all, the same
obstacles to overcome.
As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality
that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry
on this ground. Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he
always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a witticism, unless by
accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel influenced him in a way far
more vital. The lines of their lives converged, but King had moulded
and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought
American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of
a piece, yet broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their
paths at last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life,
past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no
base at all. King's abnormal energy had already won him great success.
None of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress to
adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized, as
a civil--not military--measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled
the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper or
coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted
lay ready for him--scientific social, literary, political--and he knew
how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the
richest and most many-sided genius of his day.
So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many
and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the
ideal American they all wanted to be. The women were jealous because,
at heart, King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more
robust.
The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings
towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little
proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the
law of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for
complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or
even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them
like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to persuade
him that history was more amusing than science. The only question left
open to doubt was their relative money value.
In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer far
away. No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were,
they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when
Adams started back to Cambridge, to take up again the humble tasks of
schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education,
systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on,
submissive.
CHAPTER XXI
TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
ONCE more! this is a story of education, not of adventure! It
is meant to help young men--or such as have intelligence enough to seek
help--but it is not meant to amuse them. What one did--or did not
do--with one's education, after getting it, need trouble the inquirer
in no way; it is a personal matter only which would confuse him.
Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth educating; most keen judges incline
to think that barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of
reacting to any purpose on the forces that surround him, and fully half
of these react wrongly. The object of education for that mind should be
the teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy. No doubt the
world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as to make
a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did for Henry Adams; but
education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction,
invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at
haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their
world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough
who know how to learn. Throughout human history the waste of mind has
been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has
conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal,
but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly
fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or the
viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths
of their energy in doing it.
Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871,
and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At the
end of twenty years, he found that he had finished, and could sum up
the result. He had no complaint to make against man or woman. They had
all treated him kindly; he had never met with ill-will, ill-temper, or
even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He had never seen serious
dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a readiness in the young to
respond to suggestion that seemed to him far beyond all he had reason
to expect. Considering the stock complaints against the world, he could
not understand why he had nothing to complain of.
During these twenty years he had done as much work, in
quantity, as his neighbors wanted; more than they would ever stop to
look at, and more than his share. Merely in print, he thought
altogether ridiculous the number of volumes he counted on the shelves
of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served a useful
purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of his friends,
even the artists, none of whom held any lofty opinion of their success
in raising the standards of society, or felt profound respect for the
methods or manners of their time, at home or abroad, but all of whom
had tried, in a way, to hold the standard up. The effort had been, for
the older generation, exhausting, as one could see in the Hunts; but
the generation after 1870 made more figure, not in proportion to public
wealth or in the census, but in their own self-assertion. A fair number
of the men who were born in the thirties had won names--Phillips
Brooks; Bret Harte; Henry James; H. H. Richardson; John La Farge; and
the list might be made fairly long if it were worth while; but from
their school had sprung others, like Augustus St. Gaudens, McKim,
Stanford White, and scores born in the forties, who counted as force
even in the mental inertia of sixty or eighty million people. Among all
these Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest
existences, trying to fill in the social gaps of a class which, as yet,
showed but thin ranks and little cohesion. The combination offered no
very glittering prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years with as
much patience and effort as though it led to fame or power, until, at
last, Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficiently performed and his
account with society settled. He had enjoyed his life amazingly, and
would not have exchanged it for any other that came in his way; he was,
or thought he was, perfectly satisfied with it; but for reasons that
had nothing to do with education, he was tired; his nervous energy ran
low; and, like a horse that wears out, he quitted the race-course, left
the stable, and sought pastures as far as possible from the old.
Education had ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest
mattered so little!
As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the
question of return imposed its verdict on him after much fruitless
effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of January, 1892; he
was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of midwinter. He was close on his
fifty-fourth birthday, and Pall Mall had forgotten him as completely as
it had forgotten his elders. He had not seen London for a dozen years,
and was rather amused to have only a bed for a world and a familiar
black fog for horizon. The coal-fire smelt homelike; the fog had a
fruity taste of youth; anything was better than being turned out into
the wastes of Wigmore Street. He could always amuse himself by living
over his youth, and driving once more down Oxford Street in 1858, with
life before him to imagine far less amusing than it had turned out to
be.
The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week he
reflected on what he could do next. He had just come up from the South
Seas with John La Farge, who had reluctantly crawled away towards New
York to resume the grinding routine of studio-work at an age when life
runs low. Adams would rather, as choice, have gone back to the east, if
it were only to sleep forever in the trade-winds under the southern
stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean, with its purple sense of
solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the
most unearthly he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard
Kipling's "Mandalay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem,
like millions of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world
exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of beginning
a new education. The old one had been poor enough; any new one could
only add to its faults. Life had been cut in halves, and the old half
had passed away, education and all, leaving no stock to graft on.
The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him
fantastic. Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some kind of
existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it reasonable. In
Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the dismal ballets at the