The Education of Henry Adams
Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at the old Palais Royal; but,
except for them, his own Paris of the Second Empire was as extinct as
that of the first Napoleon. At the galleries and exhibitions, he was
racked by the effort of art to be original, and when one day, after
much reflection, John La Farge asked whether there might not still be
room for something simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the
world, it was no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It
should express what it was; and this was something that neither Adams
nor La Farge understood.
Under the first blast of this furnace-heat, the lights seemed
fairly to go out. He felt nothing in common with the world as it
promised to be. He was ready to quit it, and the easiest path led back
to the east; but he could not venture alone, and the rarest of animals
is a companion. He must return to America to get one. Perhaps, while
waiting, he might write more history, and on the chance as a last
resource, he gave orders for copying everything he could reach in
archives, but this was mere habit. He went home as a horse goes back to
his stable, because he knew nowhere else to go.
Home was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration ended,
in 1877, and Evarts became Secretary of State, Adams went back there,
partly to write history, but chiefly because his seven years of
laborious banishment, in Boston, convinced him that, as far as he had a
function in life, it was as stable-companion to statesmen, whether they
liked it or not. At about the same time, old George Bancroft did the
same thing, and presently John Hay came on to be Assistant Secretary of
State for Mr. Evarts, and stayed there to write the "Life" of Lincoln.
In 1884 Adams joined him in employing Richardson to build them
adjoining houses on La Fayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this
was it. To the house on La Fayette Square he must turn, for he had no
other status--no position in the world.
Never did he make a decision more reluctantly than this of
going back to his manger. His father and mother were dead. All his
family led settled lives of their own. Except for two or three friends
in Washington, who were themselves uncertain of stay, no one cared
whether he came or went, and he cared least. There was nothing to care
about. Every one was busy; nearly every one seemed contented. Since
1871 nothing had ruffled the surface of the American world, and even
the progress of Europe in her side-way track to dis-Europeaning herself
had ceased to be violent. After a dreary January in Paris, at last when
no excuse could be persuaded to offer itself for further delay, he
crossed the channel and passed a week with his old friend, Milnes
Gaskell, at Thornes, in Yorkshire, while the westerly gales raved a
warning against going home. Yorkshire in January is not an island in
the South Seas. It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti; not many to
Fiji or Samoa; but, as so often before, it was a rest between past and
future, and Adams was grateful for it.
At last, on February 3, he drove, after a fashion, down the
Irish Channel, on board the Teutonic. He had not crossed the Atlantic
for a dozen years, and had never seen an ocean steamer of the new type.
He had seen nothing new of any sort, or much changed in France or
England. The railways made quicker time, but were no more comfortable.
The scale was the same. The Channel service was hardly improved since
1858, or so little as to make no impression. Europe seemed to have been
stationary for twenty years. To a man who had been stationary like
Europe, the Teutonic was a marvel. That he should be able to eat his
dinner through a week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That he
should have a deck stateroom, with fresh air, and read all night, if he
chose, by electric light, was matter for more wonder than life had yet
supplied, in its old forms. Wonder may be double--even treble. Adams's
wonder ran off into figures. As the Niagara was to the Teutonic--as
1860 was to 1890--so the Teutonic and 1890 must be to the next
term--and then? Apparently the question concerned only America. Western
Europe offered no such conundrum. There one might double scale and
speed indefinitely without passing bounds.
Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling, on his wedding
trip to America, thanks to the mediation of Henry James, dashed over
the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and wit--as though
playing a garden hose on a thirsty and faded begonia. Kipling could
never know what peace of mind he gave, for he could hardly ever need it
himself so much; and yet, in the full delight of his endless fun and
variety, one felt the old conundrum repeat itself. Somehow, somewhere,
Kipling and the American were not one, but two, and could not be glued
together. The American felt that the defect, if defect it were, was in
himself; he had felt it when he was with Swinburne, and, again, with
Robert Louis Stevenson, even under the palms of Vailima; but he did not
carry self-abasement to the point of thinking himself singular.
Whatever the defect might be, it was American; it belonged to the type;
it lived in the blood. Whatever the quality might be that held him
apart, it was English; it lived also in the blood; one felt it little
if at all, with Celts, and one yearned reciprocally among Fiji
cannibals. Clarence King used to say that it was due to discord between
the wave-lengths of the man-atoms; but the theory offered difficulties
in measurement. Perhaps, after all, it was only that genius soars; but
this theory, too, had its dark corners. All through life, one had seen
the American on his literary knees to the European; and all through
many lives back for some two centuries, one had seen the European snub
or patronize the American; not always intentionally, but effectually.
It was in the nature of things. Kipling neither snubbed nor patronized;
he was all gaiety and good-nature; but he would have been first to feel
what one meant. Genius has to pay itself that unwilling self-respect.
Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again
in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return
to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying
dead. Changes had taken place there; improvements had been made; with
time--much time--the city might become habitable according to some
fashionable standard; but all one's friends had died or disappeared
several times over, leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or
London. Slowly, a certain society had built itself up about the
Government; houses had been opened and there was much dining; much
calling; much leaving of cards; but a solitary man counted for less
than in 1868. Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both
Executive and Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have
the ear of anybody in Government. No one in Government knew any reason
for consulting any one in society. The world had ceased to be wholly
political, but politics had become less social. A survivor of the Civil
War--like George Bancroft, or John Hay--tried to keep footing, but
without brilliant success. They were free to say or do what they liked;
but no one took much notice of anything said or done.
A presidential election was to take place in November, and no
one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were
singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of them had
no friends; the other, only enemies. Calvin Brice, who was at that time
altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of the Senate, was in the
habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in glowing terms and at great length,
as one of the loftiest natures and noblest characters of ancient or
modern time; "but," he concluded, "in future I prefer to look on at his
proceedings from the safe summit of some neighboring hill." The same
remark applied to Mr. Harrison. In this respect, they were the greatest
of Presidents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies, was as
nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on their friends.
Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To the American people,
the two candidates and the two parties were so evenly balanced that the
scales showed hardly a perceptible difference. Mr. Harrison was an
excellent President, a man of ability and force; perhaps the best
President the Republican Party had put forward since Lincoln's death;
yet, on the whole, Adams felt a shade of preference for President
Cleveland, not so much personally as because the Democrats represented
to him the last remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of
Hosea Biglow's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a
banker's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years, more and
more despotic over Esop's frog-empire. One might no longer croak except
to vote for King Log, or--failing storks--for Grover Cleveland; and
even then could not be sure where King Banker lurked behind. The costly
education in politics had led to political torpor. Every one did not
share it. Clarence King and John Hay were loyal Republicans who never
for a moment conceived that there could be merit in other ideals. With
King, the feeling was chiefly love of archaic races; sympathy with the
negro and Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies; but with
Hay, party loyalty became a phase of being, a little like the loyalty
of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw all the failings
of the party, and still more keenly those of the partisans; but he
could not live outside. To Adams a Western Democrat or a Western
Republican, a city Democrat or a city Republican, a W. C. Whitney or a
J. G. Blaine, were actually the same man, as far as their usefulness to
the objects of King, Hay, or Adams was concerned. They graded
themselves as friends or enemies not as Republicans or Democrats. To
Hay, the difference was that of being respectable or not.
Since 1879, King, Hay, and Adams had been inseparable. Step by
step, they had gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shunning than
inviting public position, until, in 1892, none of them held any post at
all. With great effort, in Hayes's administration, all King's friends,
including Abram Hewitt and Carl Schurz, had carried the bill for
uniting the Surveys and had placed King at the head of the Bureau; but
King waited only to organize the service, and then resigned, in order
to seek his private fortune in the West. Hay, after serving as
Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary Evarts during a part of
Hayes's administration, then also insisted on going out, in order to
write with Nicolay the "Life" of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and
when his friends asked the reason, he could not go into long
explanations, but preferred to answer simply that no President had ever
invited him to fill one. The reason was good, and was also conveniently
true, but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or capacity. Why had
no President ever cared to employ him? The question needed a volume of
intricate explanation. There never was a day when he would have refused
to perform any duty that the Government imposed on him, but the
American Government never to his knowledge imposed duties. The point
was never raised with regard to him, or to any one else. The Government
required candidates to offer; the business of the Executive began and
ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social formula carried
this passive attitude a shade further. Any public man who may for years
have used some other man's house as his own, when promoted to a
position of patronage commonly feels himself obliged to inquire,
directly or indirectly, whether his friend wants anything; which is